I am going to Fort Lauderdale for ten weeks and I’m bringing some of my starter with me to bake, but I’m also going to keep some starter in Toronto. This is what I did to prepare my starter for a long hibernation. I’m now down in Fort Lauderdale.
Hi everybody.
I have a bakery in El Salvador, central america. I used to check this block to solve some doubts. Great work what your are doing.
I could not find some topic that help me on this.
Like many others I have tried my hand at Irish soda bread from time to time. I've never been happy with the results. The loaf has usually been flat, dry, crumbly, more scone-like. Usually I have baked the loaves free-standing, a few times in an open skillet, and I usually have used baking powder instead of baking soda because it's more tolerant and why not?
I've read up on the history of Irish soda bread, and I even received a bag of King Arthur's Irish-style Whole Wheat flour for Christmas.
I have not made a bread with coffee in a long time so I figured it was time to try one again.
I used one of my favorite whole wheat berries from Barton Springs Mill Quanah along with some spelt berries and milled fresh flour. The Quanah was sifted and milled twice and the Spelt was sifted once and milled twice both with my MockMill 200. I milled the whole grains in my MockMill200, sifted with a #30 sieve, re-milled and then sifted with a #40. I save the bran to add to my levains which I find give them a nice boost.
I call these “Italian” style pretzel rolls. These are made with a 2 build durum starter and with over 50% total fresh milled durum. I also used some fresh milled whole wheat and just a little bit of KAF bread flour to add a little gluten strength but you could probably leave it out and sub more durum or whole wheat.
The durum and whole wheat flour was sifted twice and milled twice with my Mockmill 200.
Made a simple enriched Italian bread that is very versatile. My mom made this a lot growing up. One of my favorites for sure. This loaf was about 1000 grams.
This was a fun outcome. I tried out my new petite Fat Daddy loaf pans and they do fit into my roasting pan side by side, thanks to the vertical sides and small rolled rims. The loaves merged together where the pans touched.
I preheated the roasting pan sitting on top of a pizza stone in the oven. Final shaped panned proof was only 15 minutes. I loaded them into the roasting pan, sprayed then with water, and put the lid on.
This is the best oven spring I've gotten. The flour was 100% freshly milled spelt. No sifting.
For today's bake, I decided to take a page from Benito's book and make a whole wheat sourdough with 2% vital wheat gluten and a bran scald. I used freshly milled hard red wheat and sifted it with a 50 mesh sieve.
Scald:
Main dough
This was a nice flavorful bread made with fresh milled Durum, Rye and Rouge de Bordeaux whole wheat. I used some baked potatoes that were mashed up but still chunky so you end up with a rustic bread with pieces of potato throughout.
The buttermilk was originally going to be used in my English Muffins but I forgot so I pivoted and used it in this bake instead. It adds a little extra tang to the final bread.
Another birthday get together this evening means another cake needing to be baked. I had just enough cream cheese left over from the ginger breads so I decided to bake a popular southern US cake. The Hummingbird cake has quite a few variations, but generally they all have bananas, pineapples and warm spices along with cream cheese icing as this one has. Generally I don’t love a ton of icing on cakes, so I then to avoid layer cakes. This one just has the drizzle icing on top. Mine was a bit too thick so didn’t drip down the sides without some coaxing.
