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My last few bakes haven't been so successful. Formulae that usually turned out well were coming out of the oven looking sad. I can't figure out if I was over or under-proofing. I kept trying at it to get the timing right on Glezer's Colombia. Incidentally I posted about it on my blog because it's the family's favorite bread, but lately the scoring just doesn't open up. The flavor is great, but I can't get it to look the way I want it to anymore! Ugh! Then I made a few other breads that just turned out so-so. How is it that my bread could be getting worse?

Recently I have been experimenting with making sourdough multigrain breads.   My first attempt had 50% bread flour, 25% spelt, and 25% rye.   Suffice it to say, I hope our friendly neighborhood coyote didn't break a tooth on it.   Yesterday, I went down to 6% spelt, 6% rye.   This wasn't bad.   Today, I went down even further and made baguettes with 3% rye, 3% spelt.   This was downright tasty.   Here they are with a flag in honor of Patriot's Day.

I'm so excited. I just ordered a new mill. I can hardly wait to start milling my own grains. Since I bake almost exclusively with whole grains this is a big deal for me. I've been ordering my flour out of state, about once or twice a month so I figure it will pay for itself in about a year.

There is a place very close to the house that sells grains in bulk so I'm pretty set, although I don't know if they have specialty grains like spelt, durum and kamut.

The bagel recipe is from Nancy's Siliverton's book "Breads from the La Brea Bakery". The procedure is very similar to the one in BBA, cold rise, boil, bake, except that it uses some starter in addition to commercial yeast. I like the end product a lot, as happy as I was with the BBA ones, I find these ones are more chewy, the crumb is tighter, more like a true NY bagel. I used various toppings, my favorite one was Asiago Cheese, yum!

This is a batard i made last weekend:

Ingredients:

 - 400g freshly milled Hard White Wheat

 - 300g Water

 - 100g WholeWheat Sponge / levain / preferment (at 68% hydration)

 - 9g fine Sea Salt

-----------

800 g Final Dough at 73% Hydration

Process:

1 - Flour ,Water, and salt mixed to form a dough (SOAKER), and left 8 Hours at room temperature.

A few days ago, DonD blogged about some gorgeous baguettes he baked using a combination of unconventional mixing and fermentation techniques adapted from formulas developed by Pierre Gosselin and Anis Bouabsa, both very highly regarded Parisian boulangers. His description can be found here: Baguettes a l'Ancienne with Cold Retardation

I had a choice today clean my house or bake. I opted for baking. Cleaning will have to wait until later today or tomorrow. I started to make PR bagels. It was an easy recipe to follow. I made no changes to the recipe. I found diastatic malt syrup at a local beer store and used that as the sweetener. I formed the bagels using the rope method. The first couple were a bit misshapen but got the hang of it. I put them in the fridge to retard overnight. I woke up at 3 and 5 AM but made myself wait until 6:30. I had to get up to boil and bake them to see how they turned out.

Just a little sign of life to say hello and to show that I'm still happily baking, not as much as I would like too but still enjoying it very much.

The pictures show a freshly egg-washed Zopf and my spelt multigrain boule.

Thomas

I just posted this recipe over at my blog ChewsWise, where I give much longer description. But I thought bakers here would be interested. This recipe makes two large batards or boules.

Sourdough
70 grams stiff starter
80 grams water
60 grams organic white bread flour
60 grams organic spelt flour