A back to basics day with two simple bakes.
First - gluten free crunchy-outside-chewy-inside almond cookies that take 5 mins to mix and another 13 to bake.
To make 30 small cookies
Arthritis threatens me with an eternity of store-bought bread unless I can find a stand mixer that can knead dough. I have 2 Kitchenaids that are only good at teaching dough to pirouette.
I was looking for an easy way to make a slab of butter for laminated dough, and this worked a dream. I used the two sizes of vac bag in the first pic to plan out how big I wanted to roll the dough out. Then I vac sealed the butter (straight out of the fridge, no need to soften), flattened initially by hand, then used the rolling pin to fill all the corners of the bag with butter.
To remove, put the bag in the freezer for 30-45 mins until it is frozen hard. Cut open and peel away the bag. It is soft enough to work after 10-15 minutes sitting on the dough.
It's been awhile... I've started venturing out again beyond my weekly sourdough. This was primarily spurred on by starting to get my whole grain from Barton Springs Mill instead of Azure. I cannot heap enough praises on the flavor and aroma from everything I've got from there. The ryes, in particular, are stunning. More on ryes down the line, I've had some good successes there.
I made a version of this several months ago. This time, I added dried raspberries and used Butler’s Gold whole wheat from Barton Springs Mill.
The durum and the whole wheat were milled in my MockMill 200 and sifted with a #30 drum sieve, re-milled, and then sifted with a #40 drum sieve.
The Butler’s Gold WW is an organic modern Red Winter Wheat with a neutral classic wheat flavor and is considered a relatively high-strength flour. The protein content is 15.5%.
No anise, no pernod, no problem. Here's a vitebsk rye in which I used absinthe as the flavoring.
In recent times I have massively improved the performance of my Lievito Madre starter and thought about doing something other than panettone. Off the top of my head I devised a formula, originally without egg but ended up adding one egg as my planned mixture needed more hydration. By the time of shaping and proofing, the dough was perhaps a little too soft but it worked out nonetheless.
I've been too busy to cook myself dinner recently, let alone do much baking, but managed to find some time over the past week!
I think something that's nice about sakadane is that it is quick to set up and maintain - less than a week to get a starter that's usable, you only need to feed it once a week, and it's usable right out of the fridge. The only downside is needing koji rice. But it just feels so forgiving (when used with white flour, anyway).
I awoke from uneasy dreams this morning at six to mess up another rye.
Past midnight last night, tired but too spaced to sleep, I mixed a preferment -- 11g of rye sourdough to 300g of whole rye flour (an inoculation rate of 3.6%) and 240g of water. I also stirred up a malt scald -- 10g of rye malt to 50g of hot water.
This is an earthy, delicious and easy loaf to make. Flour composition is: 22% whole red spelt, 22% wholegrain, 20% whole barley, 16% whole teff and 20% white bread flour. Hydration is 75%.
I began the night before by making a biga with the 22% spelt and 22% wholegrain. The biga was 45% hydration and consisted of 10% of my standard rye starter. I left this to ferment for 15 hours at around 15 degrees.
