Blog posts

It's been a while since I've been here, but not since I've made bread. I've got a pumpernickel on the counter, a sourdough slow fermenting in the fridge, and a soaker/biga combo for a whole wheat sesame sandwich loaf I'll make tomorrow. With nothing to do I'm considering making a partial whole wheat hokkaido milk roll...

In any case, I'm realizing that I'm just not the sort of person to faithfully keep a baking log. But perhaps I can give an impressionistic account of the current state of my bread baking journey.

Another in Abel's ongoing postings of embarrassingly wonderful bakes:  His Ziggy stoneground loaf from mid-January caught my fancy, and I was sure that when the time was appropriate, I'd try my hand at his scoring technique here.  Well, the time is appropriate.  With neighbors coming over for some wine, bread and cheese this afternoon, I figured, why not now?

My starter has stopped doubling in size. I usually feed  50g if starter with 80g strong flour, 20g wholemeal and 100g of water. Any recommendations? Should I go back to 50g starter, 50 strong flour, 50g water. 

Second question if I used rye flour to feed my starter what would the impact be to both my bread and starter?

Thanks

I’ve been experimenting with different flour combinations lately. The two recipes below are what I baked the last two Saturdays. The onion rye SD was inspired by Ian’s rye porridge recipes and I modified dabrownman’s bran leaven method to put into use in the cinnamon SD.

50% rye with onion and potato

For the dough

50% dark rye

20% whole spelt

30% whole wheat

95% whey

12% starter

I’m so excited that this forum affords me my own blog! What a unique and valuable perk!

As I continue My self-guided tour of the baking and bread world, I sometimes become frustrated with the lingo of baking. Not because I don’t understand the words. I’m a linguist at heart, and sometimes (especially when I’m writing a recipe), I can look at my musings for hours, trying to decide which word is best.

the loaf

crumb

detail crust - cracks

detail crumb - rim

I started building a starter for a weekend bake over the past few days, but on Friday morning got a bit ahead of myself and created a bigger amount of starter than I normally do.. I find feeding 1:4:4 works for my kitchen temp and starter strength when I'm feeding every 12 hours.. but then I came home late Friday night to this..

 Onions and rye go together like hot fudge and ice cream.  I haven't made a good rye bread in a while so today's bake was all about creating a flavorful onion rye with a moist open crumb.  I wanted to use my new Yeast Water in this bake but didn't want to only rely on it to leaven the bread so I mixed up a simple AP starter with some spelt bran and added the YW as part of the liquid in the main dough.

The porridge was a combo of rolled oats and rye chops (chopped rye berries) and milk to add some extra creaminess.

Leslie made some fantastic loaves with this recipe and since it was something that I had seen a number of people try and produce amazing loaves, I decided to give it a shot. Of course, I had to go and change the way the dough was put together. ?

Oat porridge sourdough has become one of my favourite breads. This is a variation on the oat porridge bread in Chad Robertson's "Tartine 3". I was intrigued by Robertson's addition of almonds and almond oil to complement the texture and flavour of the oat porridge and have been using the basic oat porridge bread recipe to explore other additions.