trailrunner's blog

It is Friday and pizza was in order. I wanted to try a different crust from last time . I made up a batch of Sullivan Bread dough yesterday. This AM it was full of bubbles. I divided it into 4 pieces and tossed them with Durum flour and placed them in containers in the fridge. At 3 PM I took two out, just as we got back from our 25 mi bike ride. At 5 PM I put the oven on with the steel in place 6 " below the broiler. Temp set to 550. At 5:45 I turned on the broiler to high/550.

I bought 5/500g  bags of Italian Chestnut flour a number of years ago. Somehow I never found anything that I liked to use it in so it sat in the freezer in its vacuum packs waiting...and waiting..and....well you get the idea. I have been cleaning out and sorting and using up . I decided to only cook from my larder for 2014  , at least as much as possible. 

Ian had posted a date SD and I thought I would go with that basic idea. I added 100g toasted almonds and 2 tbsp grated orange zest. Levain was my rye starter fed with apple yeast water. I used whey for 292g of the dough water and AYW for the rest . I soaked the coarsley chopped dates in warm whey but didn't cook them down. I divided it into 3 boules. Great fragrance and very tender crumb. Sticky goodness when you get a date chunk. Baked in 500 degree pots for 5 min. and then 10 min at 460 lid removed and 15 more min. Bold bake and nice ears.

My husband is an artist when it comes to pasta. Always wonderful . Tonight homemade tagliatelle and a shrimp topping based on one that our son , the Chef , makes frequently. Preserved lemon and capers are the key...oh...and the homemade hot cure peppers. If you want the recipe just ask...I will be glad to forward the gist of the idea .c 

oh my...apple pie !  

before baking... after...most amazing...2 apples and a small amount of " goop"...if you want I will post the link to recipe...so easy.

I hadn't baked in a while and hadn't used my AYW in weeks!   Got my odds and ends of partial bags of flour out and voila....lovely bake.   Fed my  100% hydration rye starter with spelt and AWY 2x a few hours apart...it was SO active I had to refrigerate it overnight. Used up 65g Semolina, 42 grams Italian Chestnut flour, 86 grams Kamut, 123 grams sprouted Rye and 458 grams AP KA.  Mixed and autolysed  with  640 g water without salt for 1 hr. Added salt and used speed 2 for 5 min . Very slack dough but responded well to s&f's.

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.