I am happy to have found a bread that my wife and I agree upon. I prefer hearty flavors (that stand up to obscene amounts of toppings and sauce), whereas she prefers tender white breads. It's important to find this balance given that the bread I bake is the bread we're both stuck with until I bake a new batch.
Hello,
Over the past 2 weeks, I made several easter breads to share with family and friends, here they are...
- Tsoureki - Greek Easter Breads. No, I am not greek, and I didn't know of this bread until this year, but some of my running friends are, and I made this for our recent gathering.
Greek Easter Bread
Makes one 2 ½ pound loaf
4 Tablespoons butter
2 heaping dessertspoons of honey
2 eggs
2 teaspoons dry yeast
1½ teaspoons salt (2 if using unsalted butter)
1 teaspoon anise extract
20 ounces (about 4 cups) unbleached white flour
1 1/3 cup water at room temperature
Hey All,
Just wanted to share with you some spelt sourdough batards that I baked last night. I'll post the recipe a little later. Enjoy!
Tim
Though it may sound weird, but it is a mega Batard, more like Batard a la Miche.
Ingredients:
200g Whole Rye Flour
600g Whole Wheat Flour (Half of which is bread flour)
200g White Bread Flour
200g All Purp
2 tablespoons fine Sea salt
2 Tablespoons Thym
100g starter (85% hydr)
1/2 teaspoon inst. yeast (in the final dough)
All in all, it is 75% hydration dough, with wholewheat flours as Soaker, and White flours as Biga.
I recently acquired a new toy...a camera remote that also has timer features. Playing around, I shot a time lapse video of dueling starters. Here are 9 hours condensed into 12 seconds.
On the left is my San Fran and on the right is a Swedish Rye recently received from Northwest Sourdough. Both began with 80g of starter and were fed 80g of flour and 100g of water.
The San Fran has 2 complete rises, 2 dramatic collapses and is starting a 3rd rise when the clip ends.
The Rye peaked at 3h09m and again at 5h27m.
I wasn't planning to make baguettes in my seven day bread making challenge to myself, but this morning I realized that my refrigerator was being taken over by bread byproducts. In addition to my whole wheat sour dough starter and rye sour, I had the leftover levain from the pain de compagne I made the other day, as well as the bread equivalent of a chain letter - a white flour starter for Amish Friendship Bread that a friend dropped off the other day. I had no intention of making the friendship bread. It has most likely never been cooked in an Amish kitch
Today's bake: Rustic Bread from this site. I haven't cut into it yet, but I have a feeling that it will have a nice, open texture. I didn't add any flour than what was in the recipe, so the result was a rather sticky dough that had so many bubbles while shaping that it got rather difficult. The dough was so lose that after shaping into a boule with as tight a skin as I could make, I had a rather flat pancake at the end of the final rise. But it had the best oven spring I have ever seen in a bread!
