Blog posts

It has taken me a while to make real progress with sourdough, but after a few weeks of nurturing my starter and training myself to be more patient during the bulk ferment and proofing, I'm finally getting somewhere. Really pleased with how the crust and crumb turned out on this one. Getting a decent score is my last real hurdle; I can get an ear to open up quite nicely, but my diamond and box cuts often seal up as the loaf bakes. Still playing with some parameters there. Getting sort of back to work has cut down on time available for baking, alas.

One thing that can frustrating with croissants is having nice crumb towards the periphery but a hollow and collapsed interior.  One way that can help reduce this is to cut a 1/2 slit in the base of the triangular cut out.  I think the original purpose of this slit is allow for wider loaf since it promotes lateral rolling motion widening the loaf as it rolls up.  A nice benefit if this technique is for whatever geometric, physical reason I at least will see far fewer cases of cavernesque crumb.  Just a little tip / observation for other croissanteurs out there ;) 

On a pastry kick.  For those of you who love to laminate and work with brioche doughs, I always have about 1-2 croissants worth of off-cuts which usually get balled up and baked along side the croissants then promptly cursed and thrown out.  This is what they 'monkey bread'  it's just quasi laminated waste.  So today I decided to stuff it into canele molds.  It's a bit of trip since they look like canele but taste like kouign aman.  This has got thinking of some interesting ideas from here.  Main thing to note here is that all the dough went to good use !&

I have been experimenting with different methods of creating steam without using/buying a dutch oven, knowing that the dutch oven method really is the best and most hassle-free (no lava rocks, towels etc.) way to bake artisan style breads at home. I just didn't want to accumulate another single-use kitchen item to add to my already cluttered kitchen. So far, I've been happy with emulating the dutch oven method using the inside of a slow cooker and a deep ceramic casserole dish - both of them covered by a cookie sheet or upside down metal bowl for the first 20 minutes.

Learning how make Kefir and had 2 cups to discard and just couldn't waste it.... added about 340 grams of 2 day old red ww, 1 tablespoon of honey, 1/4 cup each of Bob's RM ground flax and Anthony's oat fiber and 1/2 cup of yeast water made from a mixture of organic raisins, organic blue berries and organic apples and honey from Curtis - a local company in La Belle. Mixed,covered and left on counter overnight - about 12 hours. Kitchen temp about 75-76 degrees.

The other day I decided to finally try my hand at a sourdough boule recipe. Amazingly to me, one of them was edible and dare I say pretty darn good. The other one was, well, let's just say that it was instructive. ;)

The first thing I did was to collect some healthy starter from a local flour mill. I also bought a bag of spelt flour from them. Now, what recipe to try? I decided to go with the mill's basic Sourdough Bread Formula. 

Ingredients:

I’ve made this once before and wanted to give it another go since I still have some Einkorn and wanted to inch up the % of it in the bake.  Being aware of the difficulty baking with Einkorn, I just increased the amount from about 10% to 13.5%.  The dough handled just fine.

Bread flour 71%

Whole Red Fife 15.5%

Whole Einkorn 13.5%

Prefermented flour 9%

Diastatic malt 0.5% 

Hydration 80% 

Levain 1:1:1 with whole red fife fermented 78ºF for 6 hours.

Autolyse 3 hours.

I've read/skimmed Richard Bertinet's bread books. It would be fun to take his courses at his school in Bath, England, but I live in the US and the courses are pricey. He's an advocate of the 'slap and fold' technique.

I came upon a newly launched video course web site, Learningwithexperts.com on which he has a course.

It's a four-part course that I bought. The site's pricing is interesting. In the US, the course is US$100. But in the UK, the course is £ 29, which is about US$37.

Ingredients:

• 100g Sourdough Starter (50/50 Hard Red Wheat)
• 286g Whole Red Wheat (Home Milled)
• 376g HEB Bread Flour
• 18g Salt

This recipe was derived from the following King Arthur recipe:
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/no-knead-sourdough-bread-recipe

With the following modifications:

I've been experimenting lately with left over starter. I'm creating a stiff Pate Fermentee with it and a few days later adhoc a recipe. The breads are fine but nothing wow yet. This was my recent attempt. I'm posting this for recording keeping more than anything else.

Pate Fementee was 1 part ripe starter, 2.5 part water and 4.5 part AP flour - or 60, 132 and 270 respectively. I left it out for an hour and then put it in the fridge.

Final dough was made two days later:

- 150g pate fermente

- 125g whole wheat flour

- 375g all purpose flour

-12g salt