A few months ago I was given some French flour by my sister after her holiday in Brittany. So it was time to have another try at "proper" French pain au levain.
I haven’t baked in quite a while with the traveling that we have recently been doing. I was tasked with bringing rolls for our family dinner at my sister’s new place up in the Muskokas and this was going to be our first visit since she and her husband moved there. Everyone is a fan of milk rolls but I wanted to make them slightly different than I have for dinners past so added red Leicester cheese to the dough and the top of the rolls. They came out pretty well although I have have underdeveloped the dough somewhat limiting the oven spring.
I was pleasantly surprised by this loaf. This is a 40% whole einkorn loaf, hydration 70%, with some barley malt syrup mixed in and poppy seeds on the crust. All the einkorn is in the overnight levain. The high PFF makes this a fast bread to bake on the same day as mixing - I mixed it at 8:30 am, baked it at 12:30, and (don't frown) ate it at 2 pm with carrot lentil soup.
A friend recently asked if I could try making some semolina loaves. He missed them after his vacation in Italy and sent me references to the Matera bread.
After reading a couple of posts here, I ventured on my first loaf.
First loaf - Complete failure
I started off with what seemed to be a standard recipe. 500g semola rimacinata, 100g 70% hydration starter, 350g water, 1.5% salt.
BF took 7 hours without dough degradation but also without much gluten development. I did a final proof of about an hour and then shaped it before putting it into the oven.
Invisible Cities: This ruled. Instantly a classic for me. So much there. Other than saying it's at least in someway about psychogeography, I'm not sure I can really say anything more.
Today's Bread: PDLarry's custard bun. Elements are there, but it needs another try, too much bursting and I definitely overproofed and underbaked them. The custard was delicious however.
I was jonesing for some rye bread and wanted it sooner rather than later, which ruled out taking time to refresh my starter and build a levain. In leafing through The Rye Baker, I came across a Yogurt Rye bread that was leavened with yeast and thought "That looks interesting." It's also a bread that I haven't made previously. So I made it.
Touki Bouki: Varying from horrifying, beautiful, confusing, funny, and back to beautiful, this demands a rewatch, very powerful images
Nazi Literature in the Americas: Bolano sets up a perfect ending to the novel. The final chapter is a gut punch so unexpected and shocking that it recontextualises the rest of the book; no longer are the frightful entries merely abstract and historical encyclopedia entries but rather real personnages, real events, real suffering.
A while back I had made this Hamelman "Farmer's Bread" with yogurt, per his directions, and found it boring. But after a friend dropped off some home-made Quark cheese this week, I decided to give it another go since he mentioned he was recreating a quark bread from his days in germany. And it's really good! A nice pain-au-levain type taste in only 4 hours start to finish.
This is a follow-up to Precaud's interesting post on enhancing oatiness. And my, what a journey. I love my oats, and have lots of experience making them for granola, incorporating a portion into my bread and so forth, but at a high percentage, oats do very funny things.
I had a bread party in the office a few days ago and brought three breads:
