Blog posts

These were the other batch of rolls I made to bring to Thanksgiving dinner. You can’t go wrong combining cranberries with pecans, walnuts and potatoes.  Well at least in my opinion :).

I soaked the dried cranberries in water for several hours and after draining the cranberries I used the remaining water as indicated in the main dough.  I also added some cherry juice to the levain but if you have cranberry juice you can use that instead or just omit it and use all water.

  I had made a version of these rolls a few years ago and decided to update it slightly and make them to bring to my relatives house for Thanksgiving along with another style of roll I will post later.

The main change was to use Caputo 00 flour instead of bread flour and to use a Cocoa bean infused maple syrup.  This created a softer roll.  I’m not sure you really taste the cocoa bean maple syrup to be honest so using regular flavored maple syrup would probably not make much of a difference.

Over the past year, I've made lots of versions of Ilya's easy deli rye. This weekend, with only whole rye flour and bread flour on hand, I made a 45% rye version. It turned out lofty with a thin crispy crust and soft, lightly tangy interior and I wanted to share it and pay homage to a great, flexible formula.

Rob

This is the latest addition to my daily bread rotation. The idea of building this formula is to create a sort of 'cookie cutter' formula, in which the black rice portion can be swapped with other gluten free flours (oats, buckwheat, bean flours, toasted bran, brown rice, etc) depending on what I have on hands. And also to prevent boredom. The goal is to create a dough that is rougly equivalent to dough made with 100% 10% protein white flour.

For this Community Bake of Infinity Bread bake I decided to use some blue corn from New Mexico that a friend gave me this summer.

I started by refreshing my sourdough starter with 25 grams whole wheat and 75 grams AP along with 100 grams of water.  Not long after I soaked 100 grams of sesame seeds in 175 grams of water.  

Once the starter reached peak bubbliness I mixed up the dough.

Dough Formula:

I’ve been enjoying baking with my King Arthur sourdough starter so much this fall! I’ve settled on a recipe that I love for my basic bread, the Taste of Artisan no-knead sourdough. It’s a 70% hydration recipe that works very well as an overnight room temp proof. I start the dough around 4-5pm, do several stretch and folds every 45 minutes until around 9pm, then let it sit on the counter until morning. Divide, shape, and place bannetons into the fridge for at least 2 hours.

Honing my improvisation skills! No measurements on that one, not even by volume. Mostly rye, some whole wheat in final dough 

First stiff rye preferment, after that soft one. Rye scald with chocolate barley malt, then acidification of the scald. Opara, final dough, bulk ferment (speedy, only 40 minutes) and final proof, which should last longer, but I didn't have time; that's why the loaf cracked.

Recently I posted a blog with my revised version of Infinity Bread.  That version used emmer flour, and I commented that I intended to try the bread with einkorn in place of the emmer.  Here it is.

This is an excellent bread too, and in some ways I prefer the einkorn version over the one with emmer.  Of course, a few bakes with each will be necessary before I can conclude that, and in any event both versions are fine.

Here are the two loaves.

I did the Infinity loaf challengeon October 30, but I'm just now getting around to posting it. I did not really like how the bread came out. It was very crumbly and a bit sandy. That said, I'm not really partial to cornbread either.

The "other" flours I used were rye, oat flour, and corn meal. For seeds, I used soaked bulgur wheat and toasted pecan pieces. The inclusions were fine. I'm not so sure about the cornmeal and oat flour though. I'll try it again after the holidays. And soak the cornmeal next time.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that the post will be my only post, simply as a 'gratitude' post for all the bread baking knowledge I've learned, allows me to eat healthier. Now to think that I have severe commitment issue, which hinders me from having hobbies those I can cling to in long term, maybe it's a good idea for me to write structured methods. The idea is, when I for some reason no longer feel like baking again, and somehow want to get back to it, I have something that I can directly look into without feeling overwhelmed.