wassisname's blog

A funny thing happened in the pastry chapter of Tartine No.3… 

Just a few pics of breads that I took to the fair this year.  I had a lot of fun, earned a few ribbons, and got a lot of bread out of it! 

I finally got a chance to answer Karin’s latest challenge.  It was a good one and left me with a good loaf of bread, too!

The first bake in my new oven!  After weeks of no baking I have been craving something hearty, so I went to Hamelman’s Bread and opened it to a bread I had had bookmarked for a long time.  This has got to be one of the most cumbersome and prosaic bread names ever: 70 Percent Rye with a Rye Soaker and Whole Wheat Flour.  It feels like it should be a “Something-German Bauernbrot” but I can’t come up with anything better either so I will leave it alone for the moment.

This is a tweaked-to-suit-my-routine version of the barley and flax seed loaf in Tartine No. 3.  The biggest change was to the leaven – all whole wheat flour, 75% hydration, and more of it.  I also switched from barley flakes to cracked barley because that is what I had access to. The rest of the numbers I just put together in whatever way I thought would give me the greatest margin for error.

It took  awhile, but this is my take on Karin’s Cecilienhof Ancient Grain Rye Bread challenge.  The list of ingredients involved initially had me convinced I would stay on the sidelines for this challenge.  But I had more of them than I realized on hand already and a little searching turned up the rest (ah, the power of the internet!).  Still, I haven’t had to think this hard about a bread in a long time.             &

This is the Arkatena bread from Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley, except with rosemary instead of fennel, more salt, more heat, steam, an autolyse, some stretching and folding, and a shortcut using my own starter to create a chickpea starter.  The chickpea, aka garbanzo, aka gram flour is the unique feature of this bread.