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bread flour

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This week I borrowed "From a Baker's Kitchen" from the library. The author is Gail Sher who was the first head baker of Tassajara Bread bakery, and it was first published in 1984. In the ingredients section she mentions bread flour and goes on to describe Spring wheat and Winter wheat and their different features.

The Audrey 2 Saga: Feed #3

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So it's now 9 a.m. (about) and we're ready to go with feed number three. We've taken apart the previous feed ball and scooop out 30g of that starter from the bubbly center.

I might note here that there's a slight sour smell present although not terribly strong.

In the meantime, Mini has added a post to the original forum thread, saying she's started up a stiff ball as well so we'll then be able to track the two stiff starters at the same time to see what happens.

The Audrey 2 saga: Feed #2

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So at this point, we're at the 10 hour mark and it's getting late so I mix up a fresh ball. I gather grab some of the previous ball's insides and mix up the following:

30g stiff starter
50g spring water
50g organic rye

Here I cut back from the previous 88 grams of flour which made, in my opinion, too stiff a ball. I'm still just guestimating at this point.

And here is the resulting ball:

Start of Feed no. Two

 

Many Seed Millet Bread

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A few weeks ago, I finally got a copy of Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads.  While I've read the book (most of it several times), I hadn't actually tried any of his recipes until this weekend.  Yesterday and today, I made the Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread (his basic formula) for sandwiches next week and a modified version of his German-Style Transitional Many Seed Bread to have with dinner.  Both came out great, but since the many seed bread was the more interesting to me, that's what I decided to write about.

Oh Happy Day!

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Despite the slowing economy and despite my recent price increases due to the cost of flour, business is going so well I bought a used Hobart 30 qt today!  And paid it in full with money I earned this month and have enough left over to pay a service tech to give it a good once-over! 

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Aging

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Oh, the flour that is...As promised, I have let my home milled high extraction flour age for the 2 months as recommended by a number of texts.Once again, I made this loaf "by the numbers" - dough temperature, strokes, folds, ferment times and temperatures, etc.This time, I did feel a need to adjust - the dough seemed to "come together" a bit faster than my earlier home milled trials - but I soldiered on with the test method.

Attempt at Hamelman's Miche Pointe-à-Callière

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I'll let you be the judge(s) about the success of this attempt! I live nowhere near Pointe-à-Callière, so I can't really call the bread by that name. Miche Source Alice (?Alice Springs  in French).

1. I should've read the instructions!

I started by elaborating a starter. I used a 100% culture and 100% wholemeal (100% extraction - it's what I had at home). I ended up with 970g starter! Hamelman's recipe had the culture as 20%(D'oh!).

Low temperature

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Today I baked a sourdough bread from another book from the library, Prairie Home Breads. It was published in 2001 and has some intersting recipes. The one I chose is called Hit-the-trail sourdough and begins with an overnight sponge. By this morning it was well risen and I added the rest of the flour and the salt. 2 hours later it was ready to shape and instead of 2 boules I used half to make breadsticks. My question is about the suggested baking temperature which was 375*. I did increase it to 400* and I used the stone and stainless steel bowl method.