Blog posts

Great bake wood fire oven

 Pao de Figo. Another Portuguese bread. The filling is made by slowly cooking dried figs and fresh rosemary in port wine. You roll out the dough and spread the filling on half. Fold the other half over, cut into strips, twist and braid. The braid is formed into a circle and left to rise. But the recipe did not specify the amount of water to use. I started with half a cup and it was a bit too dry. I added another quarter cup, which was too much. The dough was a bit too soft and it collapsed in the oven.

I wanted to have a go at making a porridge bread using Bob's Red Mill 6 grain + flaxseed hot cereal mix.  I added some barley flakes and some wholewheat flour, freshly milled.

Levain: 86 g @ 100% hydration built the day before, with the final build having some bran included. It was left to mature overnight.

Made a decent and straight forward white wheat sourdough today. Never had a crust crackle as loud and as long as this one did once pulled from the oven. It's went well with oil and balsamic.

So, as a college student, it's oftentimes hard to bake consistently. Especially considering I pretty much only bake long-fermented sourdough breads. Things have been pretty busy, so I hadn't baked for a while.

I decided I'd like to try tweaking around my timing to see if I can possibly fit in baking easier to my schedule. I'd bought a jar of olives to snack on, and saw my starter as I was putting it into my fridge -- an idea formed in my mind.

Since my previous post I've taken a number of steps to clean up the site and reduce the amount of personal information stored here. Most notably, just by removing accounts that never activated or activated but never posted and haven't logged in in years, I was able to shrink the user database by over 75% (!).

This is my second attempt at both barley flour and sprouted white wheat flour. I’ve wanted to retry working with barley flour since my failed first try. After Ian posted his Guinness Rye Barley Wild Rice Bread, I decided that I’d be brave and incorporate barley into my bread again.

30/30 Freshly Milled Barley/Sprouted White Wheat Sourdough

Dough flour:

90g       30%      Freshly milled pearl barley flour (since I can’t get whole)

We know how much Lucy loves her Mexican food so she went all in to make a bread that would hold up to our planned Red Pork Enchiladas.  I have to admit she relay came up with a Duesy this time.  It is way different than her normal bran levain, some portion whole sprouted fare.

Another batch of Vermont SD, ho-hum.  However this time I decided to score these differently as well as some pre-shaping changes and a more gentle final shaping.  Which I'll attribute to the shorter and slightly stubbier look of these 

In the spirit of Abel's Ziggy scoring, which I've done  few times now - I decided to try a cross cut, "x's" all down the length of the dough.  And wound up with two distinct looks.