yozzause's blog

What a mouthfull of a title and what and what a mouth full of a bread

I have recently made a very nice Dark Irish Stout and retained the dregs from the bottom of the fermenter. The stout has just been sampled with  a very big tick of approval it was a very vigourous brew and performed very well indeed. i took 250 grams of stoneground wholemeal flour and added 250mls of my brewery sludge  and bought it together and set it aside as a soaker.

Me and My grand daughter EMILY aged 4  baking mini pizzas 2010

What fun we had and lunch to boot

I was always amused as an apprentice that in the award rates for bakers there was a category for single handed baker  i could just imagine some poor soul that had been in a loosing argument with the dough dividing machine. Of course it actually referred to a baker employed on wages working alone doing the whole kit and caboodle.   

the other evening i took home some of the sour dough culture that was excess to requirement and decided to use it in a fruit dough.

The sour doughculture itself was made from feeding the lees from a cider brew that i had recently made  and was now a very active culture, i measured up 600g of flour and used 200g of culture to this i added 300g water 6g salt 18g dry yeast 48g butter 90g raw sugar 10g molassess.

this ended up being a bit to wet so i had to add a further 100g flour.

The first night in CUE and a good sleep ensued, i was awoken by the unmistakeable sound of rain falling on the caravan roof lightly at first but then a little heavier, bad news for prospecting in the flat red dirt but ordinarily a most welcomed sound out here. The clouds had been chasing us all the way from Perth some 640 kilometres behind us.

I have just returned from a gold prospecting trip here in Western Australia, the trip was organized by my good mate Bob,and it was to be a 2 week away jaunt.

There were two vehicles and a trailer and 4 guys along with my SOUR DOUGH culture setting off from Perth on a saturday morning, we had some rain overnight but the spirits weren't dampend as we picked up the two hire detectors (minelab 4500's).

just had a go at this one  but used my sour dough starter instead of dry yeast started at 5.00 pm all finished by 10.30pm.

Probably the wettest dough i have worked with and quite different from anything i've done before,  will definately do it again  and measure the amount of water that went in next time so that i can give a proper account

I

I called this horse bread  due to the fact that a number of the ingrediants are easily obtained from stockfeed stores catering for the horse people. There was some discussion on the availability or lack of Molasses in another topic on TFL. For this bread i got my daughter to pick up 2 litres of molasses from the rural store when she was picking up her bales of hay for the nags.

Another day with 40 degree C and another opportunity to use the restaurant bakery

Again i used coopers dark ale 1.5 litres , 1.5kg of sour dough starter, 5 kgs bakers flour, 75 grams dry yeast, 100 grams of butter, 12 grams bread improver (dobrim), 100  grams of cooking salt, 1.5 litres water.

i mixed the dark ale sour dough starter and 1 kg of flour into nice sponge batter leaving for an hour, then mix all other ingrediants and allow for bulk fermentation in this case 1 hour and fifteen minutes a good tripling of volume.

I made the dough for the evening restaurant class on thursday as there were quite a few absentees from the class the lecturer said you dont want to make the bread for me do you? The deal was that i had a free hand,and could make whatever I pleased! SO I had several bottles of coopers dark ale set aside that were up to their code date so at 2.30 pm I refreshed my sour dough starter and added what i would have discarded to 1.5litres of dark ale  and 1 kg of Bakers flour and made a nice slurry.