I decided I wanted to do something different and fun so why not make a multi-flavor sweet milk bread and see what happens. I found out that deliciousness happens!
FULL RECIPE AND CALCULATIONS HERE
Wanted to have a light rye bread for sandwiches and of course some extra flavor and crunch from things like seeds and nuts are always welcome. I had considered doing a sweedish limpa rye with sunflower or even a 100% rye but stumbled across this recipe from Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice and figured I'd give it a try. The original calls for some commercial yeast and can be baked on the same day the dough is mixed. It is also shaped completely differently in the book. I decided to omit that yeast and treat it as a normal sourdough with an overnight cold rise.
I've made this a few times in the past and it's always been a light and fluffy loaf. Which in all honesty this should have been but instead I made the super dense anadama BRICK! Basically instead of taking the recipe and dividing or scaling it properly I made it up and tossed it into my Pullman pan. Let it finish it's prove (which was enough to press on the lid) and baked it off. In hindsight it was probably too much dough and would have been better with less to get more of that fluffy result....but even as a dense bread it's delicious.
This one was inspired by WoodenSpoon @ thefreshloaf in this post . I had a bit of fresh lavender growing and the rains of early summer made me do this one. Some information was missing from the original post and various people have followed up with their own bakes but as far as I could see nobody had actually posted a full recipe / calculation for the bread so....
Early on in my baking adventures when looking for a 100% rye sourdough I stumbled across Patrick Ryan and his videos on the ilovecookingireland youtube channel. I was pleasantly surprised when when this more recent video came across my feed and though this would be a perfect way to use some of the fresh basil from the back garden.
I didn't have a plan for this week and had a request for some kind of onion bread. After searching around I found an onion and sage bread. Reading more about that someone mentioned that the bread tasted kind of like a Thanksgiving Stuffing. AH HA! Inspiration strikes. If I can make an onion bread with some herbs, why not make a Thanksgiving Stuffing bread. One of the easy to make instant bread stuffings in America is StoveTop stuffing. Bread crumbs, a seasoning package, and some chicken stock to hydrate...cooked on the stove or in the oven.
In planning meals for the week we decided that one night we wanted to just have a nice sandwich for dinner. A request was put in for an oat bread of some kind. Not having a go to recipe for this of course it was time to scour the fresh loaf. I ran across this beautiful post from Chelseasf and decided it was the way to go. I took her recipe and followed it but the hydration was way too high yet again. This is a trend I have seen in the Tartine recipes.
I was so impressed by the original Semolina Sourdough I made from Tartine Bread that I decided I had to try the variation listed in the book. The variation should be a sweet take on an amazing savory bread.
My usual sourdough routine has been streamlined and I generally don't have discard. In fact if I want to make pancakes I have to build extra levain when I'm prepping bread so I can make pancakes later. So when Hendrik at The Bread Code posted a video of this bread, and said it was one of his favorites, I knew I had another bread to try. I slowly built up some discard but the process was very slow and actually took a few months to build up enough to make a tiny loaf of bread.
Been a while since I had some bagels and have been craving them, so it was clearly time to revisit this wonderful recipe from Peter Reinhart in the Bread Baker's Apprentice. I've done this at least 2 or 3 times in the past always going with the poolish and commercial yeast version. I figured it was time to try the full sourdough version.
One of the first things I noticed was how much starter/levain I needed. 992 grams! Wait...really....yes really!
