Blog posts

I’ve posted a previous purple sweet potato sandwich loaf which was enriched with brown sugar and butter. I wanted to try making a loaf with the sweet potato but without the animal fat enrichment of the butter and using honey instead of brown sugar. So based on the formula that Maurizio posted on theperfectloaf.com I added mashed purple sweet potatoes to his formula and made adjustments to incorporate the sweet potato.

So in a previous blog entry, I copied over a journal I was keeping about trying to start a starter from scratch. Don’t read it, it’s not worth it. 

The long and short of it is:  though I have about a decade of experience baking with sourdough and maintaining a starter, I’d never started a culture from scratch. Oh, I’d tried, but always gave up and bought some or acquired from friends, etc.

These are a traditional Christmas time dessert from Provence France.  They are a vegan brioche so rather than butter there is olive oil used instead.  This recipe was posted by Melissa over on Breadtopia and I followed her excellent formula.  I did make some changes.  I did not have ground anise so instead used Chinese Five Spice.  Also instead of just orange, I used a combination of Meyer Lemon and a smaller amount of orange.  Pompe å L’Huile recipe

Ingredients

Hi,

I'd like to know if anybody making the wonderful recipes from K Forkish's book Water, Flour,Salt, Yeast has saved the leftovers of the levain, after taking what is needed mixing into the dough, to use it the next day or even 2 or 3 days later.

As I posted the other day, I had some beremeal, flour from an ancient variety of barley, I wanted to try using in a bread. And I also wanted to try Abe's very simple sourdough recipe (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/66384/very-simple-sourdough-recipe). And although combining two unknowns (new ingredient and new process) - what's the worst that could happen?

Dec. 17, 2020.

Based on previous experiments, I've concluded that "blended" (in a Vitamix blender, as opposed to being milled into flour) wheat berries need to be combined with milled flour to make a decent loaf.

The wheat in this recipe is a combination of 200 grams Prairie Gold (hard white spring wheat)  whole berries soaked for 11 to 12 hours, 25 grams of fine grit semolina, and 22 grams of Gold Medal bread flour.  So the P.G. was 200 / 247 = 81% of the total "flour."

Many families have unique holiday traditions, and mine is no exception. I can summon vivid childhood memories of family outings to choose and fell a tree at the farm, then decorating it with "my" ornaments while listening to Manheim Steamroller's version of Deck the Halls (what a classic!).

I have a stock of organic whole red fife flour purchased from a local farm several months ago. My first runs with it seemed to show that it was too weak to be the only flour in the bread - the dough would start breaking down around the time it was proofed to my eye- it made tasty bread, but the crumb was tighter than hard spring wheat loaves. So I was mixing it with some hard spring wheat and getting good results.

We had a combined leaving/welcome/Christmas celebration at work today, so I wanted to make a festive bake, something fruity, with a little spices. And Abe shared with me a yeasted recipe from a bread machine which seemed to tick all the boxes. Here is a rescaled version converted to sourdough with a stiff starter and a stiff preferment: https://fgbc.dk/13ja

This was a stressful bake. Mainly because lots of things did not go as planned and I had to think on my feet. I prefer mindless baking... thinking baking is stressful. The loaf came out nice though, a bit gummy, but nice.

I was thinking how I would blog about this bake, if I walked through the bake in chronological order, the blog post would get even more tedious than my normal blog posts. So, I think I will write a short summary about what went wrong and then write down the bake as it actually occurred without including the missteps along the way.