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Starting All Over Again

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Starting All Over Again

I've been hit by a mystery starter affliction. The starter, levain and dough would rise well and in a timely manner. But when the dough went into the oven, loft and oven spring were poor.

52nd bake, 06/09/2021. 25% WW durum. 40% WW red.

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June 9, 2021.

So I've been playing a lot with stone-ground WW durum. It makes great flatbread/chapatis at 100%, and great egg-less noodles at 50% mixed with 50% Golden Temple white/red bag durum.

I wrote somewhere, that anything over 33% WW durum in a leavened loaf bread just doesn't seem to be workable.  It becomes a brick, or a rubbery sponge.

Mariana mentioned that there is a popular Russian flour mix that uses 25% durum, so I thought I'd play with that number.

Plan:

Hamburger Brioche Buns

I made these a while ago and thought to post them to my blog during our 4th COVID lockdown (bored). I learned how to make these during Chef Jacob Burton’s online culinary boot camp.  I learned the bun sizes for large, regular and slider buns.

155 g each for large (4.5 inch) buns - about 114 mm

100 g each for regular size (4 inch) buns - about 100 mm

55 g each for slider size (3 inch) buns - about 76 mm

A well-formed bun was baked using foil ring molds held together with a couple of staples.

5hr dough with Italian flours

Profile picture for user yozzause

 Italian La Molisana "00" DI GRANO TENARO 75% and il Molino Durum Wheat Fine Semolina. @ 75% and 25% respectively. 2 x Epi's out of the oven now and what a great day to have it on too! This is a 5 hour bulk fermentation using just 1% compressed yeast, it did finish at the desired dough temperature but did loose a bit of temperature during BF but was quite happy Final proving in the back of the station wagon which was quite a bit warmer than the house! i am very pleased with the results from these longer fermented doughs.

Help please with summer sourdough

Toast

Hi, my most-recent sourdough bake resulted in (with an apology to the real things) hockey pucks. The dough was clearly over proofed after a 10 hour or so overnight proof.

Followed the usual FWSY recipe for overnight 40% WW bread.

My kitchen's usually in the mid 60s F in the winter, and is now running in the mid 70s.

Should I use less leavain?

Colder water for the mix?

Thanks!

1-2-3 bake with Revived Starter

Toast

So my rye starter from almost 2 years ago is going strong. I did a 1:2:2 feeding and it doubled in 6 hours so I decided to bake a 1-2-3 loaf with it. The dough was super sticky, like octopus sticky (https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/60884/sticky-shaping-sticky-dough-or-when-it-too-sticky). I first tried wetting my hands, but that only worked a little bit, so then I had to just use flour, about 1/4 of a cup and it still stuck (like chewing gum, #3 on the link) to my Silpat.

Wild Rice Blend, Onion, and Vegemite Loaf

Profile picture for user HeiHei29er

TFL'er Wish List bake #6...  Followed this one pretty close with a couple small deviations and one addition.

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/68285/wild-blend-rice-sourdough-onions

I used a RYW and SD culture combination for the initial levain and then RYW instead of water in the 2nd levain build.  Other than that, the only change I made was adding some Vegemite.  Gave the bread kind of a French Onion soup smell while it was baking.

Sandwich breads

Profile picture for user Ilya Flyamer

Made a couple of sandwich breads this week. I'm quite new to this style (mostly or all white flour with light enrichment with milk, a little butter and sugar). It seemed like an easy style to figure out, but interestingly both breads came out with (rather minor, but still) defects.