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Right now, I'm over three weeks into a project about baking sourdough rye breads.  I've been baking quite a bit, but sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of it all that's taking up space in the kitchen.

Following on the latest post of Varda, I'm giving Durum another go. Reading posts here, books  and other reading I'm treating Durum more like Rye and Whole Wheat. An additional point from Leaders book gives the dough a little more salt a final shape before going into oven. The vita C was my idea.

Makes two loaves.

Starter build;
50g KA Chakki Atta sour seed/starter (66% hydration)
120g Water
200g KA Chakki Atta flour
Overnite sourdough build of 12 hours

Final Dough;
800g KA Durum Flour
560g Water
24g Salt

I got some of the San Francisco sourdough culture from http://www.sourdo.com/. I decided to make two different starters -- one that was fed nothing but King Arthur Bread Flour, the other fed nothing but home-milled hard red and hard white wheat. Both produced extremely active cultures within 4 days of 12-hour feedings. I used the basic sourdough bread recipe from BBA, using KA Bread Flour for one, and an 85% extraction sifting of hard red wheat (13%) for the second.

With a rye starter now sitting on the bench for the foreseeable future I thought it was about time to reduce the amount of packets of cracked grains sitting in the pantry that were purchased before my Komo mill arrived.

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Hello, everybody. I have a lot of news and questions today.

This bread is “80 Percent Rye with Rye Flour Soaker” from Jeffrey Hamelman's “Bread.” No commercial yeast added. It was made from ~750g dough (83% hydration). The rye starter was made from a small amount of my good old white starter. Three weeks ago, I split my white starter in two parts, feeding one part entirely with rye flour, 2 feeds/day. For this bread I used some organic rye flour I bought from Austria (I don't know if it's medium or dark)

This is my sourdough spelt bread with fresh grounded oat and barly.

For 2 medium loafs at 60% hydration.

600 gr.  Ischia island sourdough starter- 100% Hydration

150 gr. Fresh grounded barley

50 gr. Fresh grounded oat

400 gr. Fine spelt

300 gr. Cold water

18 gr. Salt

*Mix the sourdough and the barley for around 1 minute to a sticky “heavy” dough.

 It wasn’t meant to do like that.  I fed my starter the first thing in the morning, hoping it’d be ready for the second feed sometime in early afternoon, which would be ready to be used by early evening, as usual. Then I would prepare the dough, bulk ferment with a few S & F, shape it and put in the banettons and proof overnight in the fridge, so that I could bake it the next day. That was my plan, anyway…..

In recent weeks I've been kibitzing a friend who's starting up a new restaurant where he's been trying out a recently purchased, second hand, commercial "combo oven".  The oven is proving a bit cranky and he's working out the bugs and tinkering with bake times and temperatures.  I got a chance to bake a couple test loaves in the oven and was very impressed with the "jump rise" achieved in "combo" mode (heat with superheated steam in the oven).

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

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As part of my preparation to move from South Africa back to the United States, I dried my sourdough starter using two different techniques.  The first was to simply smear a thin layer of batter-consistency starter across some parchment paper and allow it to dry at room temperature.  The second was to mix flour into some starter until it was reduced to crumbs.  I found that a mezzalune was very helpful in the latter stages of incorporating the flour by allowing me to chop the progressively stiffening starter into smaller and smaller pieces while blending in more flour.