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My wife and I recently aquirred an interest in baking Foccacia. We have made some screamin' loaves but when we compare them to a certain loaf we purchase at Trader Joe's.... we are lacking. Trader Joe's loaf is filled with large holes. That is a characteristic we love but we are not able to reproduce the holes. The recipe we use for the dough is 3 cups of bread flour, combo of .75 cup water and .25 cup of white wine at 120 degrees poured over 2.25 teaspoons of active dry yeast, to the liquid we add.....one T of olive oil.....one T of honey....and a teaspoon of Kosher salt.

Artos - Greek Saints' Day Bread from Kassos

Artos - Greek Saints' Day Bread from Kassos crumb

“Artos” is the ancient Greek word for leavened bread. (“Psomi” is the modern Greek word.) However, “Artos” has come to refer more specifically to various enriched celebration breads, particularly those baked for Easter.

But, first, the weather.  Thunder, lightening and hail may not be a big deal to people in  some localities.  But in Northern California, they are rare as reliable weather-forecasting.  Saturday, our morning coffee was interrupted by a crashing downpour of (admittedly small) hail.  It went on for many minutes and accented our garden with glistening ice.

So I finally figured out why I was having trouble getting started on making bread at home after my second SFBI class.  It's the scheduling and planning ahead.  At one time I thought bread making could be scheduled around other activities.  Now I am finding out that it's the other way around:  you have to schedule your other activities around making bread.  It will probably continue to be this way until I get the hang of it all.  Non-prefermented, non-sourdough was usually not that much of a problem for me.  When you add in 12-hour preferments, levains, bri

ingredients:

600gm unbleached bread flour

150gm dark rye flour

2.25 (14gm) teaspoon salt

2.25 (8gm) teaspoon active dry yeast (SAF brand)

1.5 tablespoon each of brown sugar(19gm), dill seed(8gm), and dehydrated onion flakes(11gm)

500 gm very warm water (just cool enough to put a finger in and not whimper or yank it out)

NOTE: increased quantities by 50% and switched from dill weed to dill seed.

procedure:

This week I made the dough for Hamelman's baguettes with poolish yet again.  This time, instead of making three 11-13 inch baguettes, scaled at 250g, I made one 750g loaf.  Since the 250g baguettes would be called demi-baguettes, clearly this was a mega-baguette. Clearly.

Okay, fine, I made a batard and scored it like a baguette.  Still it came out pretty nicely.

Crust Crackles, too!

Glenn, inadvertently, threw down the gauntlet this week when he asked a question in his post: How to get a light and tender crumb in sourdough.  I took up the challenge (even though I know Glenn didn't mean it that way) and in the process got diverted from what I had originally itended to bake this weekend. 

I purchased some Pakistani Wheat (for Atta) , and i wanted to see how it fairs in Peter Reinhart's Wholegrain Recipes. I'am not sure of the protein content of This wheat, but i read that Atta flour is between 11.5% to 13% Protein. I milled the berries, and found them to be medium hard. The resultant flour made a coherent smooth dough, and delayed fermentation helped strengthen the dough even more.

Adding Milk, Butter and Honey, helped soften the dough further, and the result was a pliable soft dough that passed windowpane test.

Though I haven't posted about bread in a while, I have my reasons. No, I am still working at the bakery baking bread daily which hasn't made me bread-sick. I still am studying to complete my degree (end of this fall it looks like!) but I make time for the important things in life (like baking!). But what is keeping me away from bread is that I am working towards my American Culinary Federation Certified Pastry Chef title, which I hope to obtain this year. What that means is I have been baking a lot of genoise cakes, cookies and attempting Bavarian cream.