Blog posts

Half white half stoneground wholemeal.

I’m really sorry if I’m boring you guys, but I’m learning a lot as I repeatedly bake the same recipe.  I did this with Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough and then Kirsten’s basic sourdough and now this 50% whole grain sourdough.  Up until now I hadn’t done any sourdough with this high a whole grain percentage, prior to this my 40% was a flat pancake.  However, after learning a few things in particular lamination when we did the CB with Kirsten, I feel that I’m getting a better handle on building structure.

I've been baking yeasted breads while I rebuilt a starter. Yesterday was the first bake with it, and I'm pleased.

The recipe is the San Francisco sourdough from BBA. I milled 5% rye and 95% hard white wheat.

I did stretch and folds every 20 minutes for the first two hours, then left it alone for three hours. Shaped and put into a banneton, then into the fridge to proof for two hours.

It's very lightly sour, which I expect from a new starter. I'll see how it develops over the next month before making a decision to keep or not.

After reading about this recipe, I decided to go for it, especially because I had never tried a 100% spelt loaf before and I like black treacle.  For the initial mixing I included sixty-five slap-and-folds because the dough felt reasonably strong, and that seemed to be fine.  Although I did try the letter fold technique for the first S&F, the dough stuck to my counter a lot, and I opted to leave the dough in my 6-quart Cambro tub for the second S&F and did the usual reach-under-and-lift-up.

I have a simple question. Why is it that we are supposed to put the shaped loaf into the banaton with the seam side UP? It seems counterintuitive to me, since the tension is on the TOP of the loaf; not on the bottom. Yet, my bread does turn out pretty good most of the time.

I don't have a round banaton. When I make boules (rarely these days), I never do that. I just put the dough on parchment and place with the top UP in a glass bowl, not with the seam up.

I replicated the method of Loaf 11 because of good result. Fewer S&Fs. 

RECIPE

100% (500g) wholewheat stoneground flour (12.7g protein per 100g)
15% (75g) starter
85% (425g) hydration
2% (10g) salt

METHOD

1 day before, I discarded most of the starter leaving only about 2 tbsp. Refreshed this with 50g water and 50g WW flour.

• 700g wholemeal spelt fl

I managed to bottle 30 bottles of Australian Ale just the other day from my home brew and also kept the dregs from the bottom of the fermenter. I decided to use some of that today to raise my dough, often referred to as a Beer Barm. I quickly worked out a dough formula and was going to make a 1KG dough but then decided that a single 750g loaf would be the go. i shook the bottle up that contained the Barm and weighed off an equal amount of flour and barm combined the two and set aside, i marked the container so that we could see its progress and its time frame.