trailrunner's blog

What a lovely bread!  As has already been said this has a tender  cool crumb and a pronounced wheat flavor and pleasant faint  sour. I didn't get quite the large holes as in Franco's bake but I altered the formulas a bit. I doubled the amounts that Franco posted. So I had about 2000 g of dough. I shaped this into 3 boules. Thus more handling.  I used the 2 starters and the only thing I altered was the whey I fed the starters. I have a lot of it as I make a lot of soft curd cheese. I put all the dough flour in all but 10% of the water and let it autolyse overnight.

Great sweet potato rolls. I had more potatoes so upped the % of ingredients. The dough is lovely to work with. I  decreased the yeast as I wasn't going to bake them yesterday.  Substituted my whey for milk. The dough responded very well to a long slow rise on the counter and then retarded in the fridge.  Filled with bubbles. Very easy to shape when cold. I retarded 15 of them....50 oz of dough...in a 13x9 covered container.

This is the Balthazar's Bakery's chocolate bread. I first ate it in 2007 at $9 a loaf. When I got home I searched and found the recipe online. It is a fantastic bread...but I took it up a huge notch with my starter instead of theirs. Wow..what a shreddable fantastic crumb. I also added dried cherries to 3 of the loaves.  An amazing bread. You will need a mixer to fully realize this dough. It needs 5 min and then 10 min and then about 2 min . It has the butter beaten in like a brioche but there are no eggs...lots of chocolate.

Latest attempt at a spelt bread was more what I was after. I still let it proof for one hour before retarding. Since reading Josh's post after I had made this I will move the shaped loaves into the fridge posthaste and not give them any bench time and see what happens. As you can see this has a lovely open crumb and I even got ears :) I attribute this to gentle handling. I incorporated John's sealing during shaping and then proofing the shaped loaf with the sealed side down and then scoring over the sealed area. Pictures show the result.

I have been traveling since Oct 5th. No baking but lots of eating of great breads from Canada to NYC ! I got home and found my YW and SD happily resting in the fridge. I fed everything and restored all to working order. I noted Ian's sweet potato bread and had an extra baked one so decided to try a variation using what I had on hand. Wild Yeast Blog has a formula from 2007 and I used it as a base to begin. http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/10/16/world-bread-food-day/.

Juergan was my inspiration when he mentioned I should try spelt in the starter on the 40/60 loaf. I thought about it and made a biga with 2 feedings using 50g spelt/50 g apple yeast water for a total of 200g, no  commercial yeast .I let it rise all night in the oven with the light on. Wow...it really grew and smelled lovely..faint apples   I subtracted that from the total liquid/flour in the  Norwich formula that I use as a base. I also subbed spelt for 1/2 the rye called for.

An experiment with pluses and minuses. The original formula was posted here:http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/28855/spelt-beach. There weren't really any directives  . I mixed the levain and it was gang busters when it grew ! I subbed my active raisin yeast water for all the water and used my rye wild yeast. I had to refrigerate it after only 6 hrs as it was already doubled. I didn't want it too sour.

With dabrownman's assistance I was able to successfully start my YW. I used organic raisins and organic  apple with spring water. I did a small test batch of levain using 50 g YW and 50 g AP flour. Growth was evident  in an hour and it tripled in 6 hrs. For this first test batch of SD I simply subbed all YW for the water in the formula. There is a lot of info on TFL about YW. RonRay has cataloged it in one post. He uses all YW for some of his breads in place of regular water. Other folks use only a TBsp or so with flour to make a levain. It is all good as far as I can tell .

I purchased several sprouted products from here. I have made my granola recipe for almost 30 years. Reluctant to try anything new I broke out the bowls and pans and did it anyway !  What a treat. I will never use plain rolled oats again. This is the perfect texture crunchy and chewy both. A wonderful complex flavor and for some reason the coconut taste comes through more in every bite also. A win-win in my book .  

I finally got around to purchasing a container of food grade lye . I had tried to find info on lye baths for bagels but there is very little out there and the percent of lye to water that was used seemed way off. I am glad that I pursued this and have some data that I hope will help others. I purchased the lye on Amazon  here . Will likely last me a good long while. I used 5 grams in 1 gallon of filtered tap water. This is approx. 12-12.5 % alkalinity.