Blog posts

I was poking around in the back of the drinks cupboard, as you do, and came across this bottle of Saltaire Triple Chocoholic stout, a long forgotten thoughtful gift from Jane, my daughter,

It seemed a pity to drink it all at once when I could enjoy it for a lot longer, one slice at a time, so it became the large part of the liquid in a pair of loaves of 40% wholewheat bread.

Here's the breakdown:

a friend told me of this flour available for a brief time at our local supermarket

Been a while since last blog, bread flour hasn't been on sale for a while, So I've been baking breads with more hearty whole grains? 

Is it safe to use a pizza stone that was left in the oven after the self cleaning process? It now looks like new, but I'm not sure it is safe you use.

Life’s been a bit busy so I’m only sharing some food photos today.

Halloumi gassi with paniyaram (yes, paneer not Halloumi is used traditionally)

Scrambled eggs with tomatoes with plain jasmine rice. My kind of comfort food :)

It’s my first blog post here, I’ve asked a few questions before and lurked a lot but thought I’d post a loaf for the first time! Here’s a simple 50% whole-wheat from the weekend.

The wheat is an organic/biodynamic milling wheat from Four Leaf in South Australia and was milled at home on my Retsel Mil-Rite. The other 50% is an organic bakers flour. 

The levain was fed 1:3:3, with a blend of fresh milled rye and organic bakers flour and left to ferment for ~4hours.

It was time to throw some seeds into some bread again. I checked out my previous methods on adding seeds and decided to go with a dry seed addition rather than using a soaker. It seems that I got a more open crumb doing this rather than doing the soaker. Hopefully, this holds true.

Recipe

Makes 3 loaves

Seed Add-ins

70 g Sunflower seeds

50 g Sesame seeds (I used half black and half white)

50 g freshly ground flax seeds

30 g Amaranth seeds

30 g Buckwheat groats

15 g Millet seeds

I was inspired by Janet Cook's gorgeous bake back in 2013 and decided to give it a go. I used my Farmer Ground Flour high-extraction bread flour. The hydration of this loaf is 80%. They smell absolutely amazing! I didn't pre-soak the poppy seeds so the dough felt pretty dry for 80% hydration and I might increase the water slightly next time. I think the crumb is decent for 100% T85. 

Final dough:

I made one HUGE loaf with sauteed shallots and cornmeal porridge (50g of cornmeal and 235g of liquid). Excluding the cornmeal porridge, this loaf was 76% hydration, but with the cornmeal it was an extremely wet dough and a bit tough to handle, but the coil folds and lamination added a lot of strength. The hydration definitely pushed my limits!

Final dough:

Another summer gone, and another summer away from baking.  Prior to taking my bake break, I mentioned to my Barcelona friends that upon return, I would also return to complete some unfinished tritordeum business.  That being to use the grain in a ciabatta.  My recent go-to ciabatta formula is a modified version of Scott MeGee’s biga based dough.