Blog posts

Just a little sign of life to say hello and to show that I'm still happily baking, not as much as I would like too but still enjoying it very much.

The pictures show a freshly egg-washed Zopf and my spelt multigrain boule.

Thomas

I just posted this recipe over at my blog ChewsWise, where I give much longer description. But I thought bakers here would be interested. This recipe makes two large batards or boules.

Sourdough
70 grams stiff starter
80 grams water
60 grams organic white bread flour
60 grams organic spelt flour

DonD's Baguettes à'Ancienne with Cold Retardation

A short while ago Don posted his latest work on these techniques he has been developing recently.   You can view his most excellent work here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/17415/baguettes-l039ancienne-cold-retardation  

Just over a week ago in a post which you can read here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/17275/french-terms

My first post in April of last year was about a side by side comparison of two of my favorite baguette formulations by Philippe Gosselin and Anis Bouabsa that David Snyder had previously published here on TFL. It was a tough choice to decide which one was better. The Gosselin baguette had an unequaled sweetness due to the overnight cold autolyse and the Bouabsa baguette had an incredibly complex taste due to the cold retardation. I was thinking why not have the best of both world so I started to experiment with combining the two formulations.

Yesterday, I transferred six gallon of new Sauvignon Blanc wine from its primary fermenter (food-grade plastic bucket), into a secondary fermenter (glass carboy), leaving behind billions of yeast cells that had done their job beautifully.  I was diluting the slurry of yeast collected on the bucket's bottom, to make it easier to pour out when I thought, "I wonder if it could bake bread?".

I'll confess, I am a 'glory poster', as such, I only post bread on my blog when I am reasonably satisfied with the result. That being said, last week I made a batch of baguettes using Hammelmans poolish recipe, suffice it to say, the final bread looked so amateurish that you would think I had never touched flour and yeast before. Sadly, this is an all to common event when I make baguettes. It is the only type of bread in my common repertoire that I can't get some level of consistency with.

Ok, here I go again. I did try to take a few more pictures-semi succesfully.

Info about the actual bake and ingredients:

-I used Arrowhead Mills Organic whole rye flour and KA Bread Flour;no medium rye flour at all

-the freshening was done using my "old bread" rye starter-freshened with old bread,too

-I did not add the optional yeast

- the freshening fermented in my oven with pilot light on for 6 hours;basic sour on countertop for 24 hours(i figure the temp was around 68-70 degrees); full sour ripened for 3 hours in pilot lit oven