After a long break I am back in my search for perfection - this time is a recipe for a perfect white loaf, and I have found it!! I have tried it in its true form and have tried to play around with the recipe, and it still stands - this IS perception in a loaf.
Full recipe on my blog here
Excuse the poor slicing photo - more photos coming on the blog soon
Susan and I have just returned from two weeks in Italy. We spent a week in Venice, a couple days in Lucca and 4 days in Liguria. We broke up our return trip with an overnight stay in Milan. I am happy to report that the bread we had was much superior to that of our last visit to Amelia-Romagna and Tuscany three years ago.
The bread we were served in restaurants was almost always made wholly with white flour.
When I was in the UK last week, I made David's excellent recipe below. As I have done many times in the past, I prepared the dough and froze half of it to bake later. I hadn't tried this with baguettes, so I was interested in how it would turn out. I froze the dough for four days. On the first batch, I had a heck of a time moving them, as I didn't have all the tools I have in my home kitchen. They got a bit flat as I moved them.
The recent posts from wassisname and limmitedbaking got me hankering to try this bread.
I used the formula here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/34729/polenta-pepita-sourdough, but, as happens in the Hippie Kitchen, modified the method:
This was an experiment to make a loaf ideal for toasting and to have a lightness of commercially "improved" bread leavened with just sourdough.
I baked my fourth and fifth Tartine Basic (Whole Wheat) Country loaves this week, using freshly milled flour. I used 100% whole wheat for the leaven and 70% Whole Wheat for the dough (which came to a 73% whole wheat for the total dough).
The flour that comes out of my Komo mill, was measuring at 105 degrees toward the end of the 700 gram grind, and the wheat berries were in the fridge for about 8 hours before grinding.
I have been baking so much lately and a lot of biscuits. The tradition here is 7 types of small biscuits served with coffee when people come over and I been a good hostess.
I have made Duche de Leche , Toffee, Dark chocolate with white chocolate chunks and macademian nuts, Toffee with white chocolate chunks, plain dark chocolate, Peppermint chocolate and vanilla.
Pew, I need a rest.
Like everyone else around her, at least those who count, Lucy loves pizza just about more than she loves pumpernickel. It is a closer race than one might think. We usually start off the weekend with grilled salmon on Friday night.
Then Saturday we do something Mexican, this year was grilled pork that was then made carnitas style by sautéing it with bacon fat in a cast iron skillet to really bring out the tastes of old Mexico.
Between wanting a break from my GF experiments and my starter requiring a refresh, it was time to bake something different, something with sourdough. For reasons not entirely clear to me, I keep going back to Leader's Local Breads in spite of its known defects. It probably has something to do with the fact that the breads, when they work, are just so good.
It's not hot here, not yet, but I am dreading the season of too hot to bake. What we have now is the sort of weather that has me firing up the grill only to have to call the whole thing off due to rain. So I am crossing my fingers for today, Memorial day.
In any case, I've made something resembling pizza on the stovetop with my cast iron grill pan and this week expanded to focaccia and something shaped reasonably like ciabatta, but lacking in the sort of holes I was hoping for, which I think means it's time to toss the last of that batch of yeast.
