Blog posts

After recent bakes I have been a bit disheartened. Earlier this week I got the Red Star Yeast newsletter and they featured “Unbelievable Sweet Orange rolls” - a variation on cinamon rolls.  I followed the recipe exactly (I made a slightly bigger dough and had to bake some rolls seperately) and whilst mine wasn’t as pretty as theirs, it went down a treat with friends tonight. it feels good to have a sucess and the taste was really nice - a combination of orange and cinamon.  yum!

Happy baker tonight

Leslie

Recently we went on a ski holiday, which was great fun, but I managed to slip over on an icy pavement when walking back to the chalet in ski boots. (No falls on the piste!) Landed on my right side, and my elbow hasn’t quite settled down yet. It didn’t interfere with skiing, but now that I’m home it is a good excuse reason to get out of the hoovering!

This week I have had another try at baking Trevor Wilson's Country Champlain bread (a Tartine style loaf).  As well as this I was making the 1:2:3 loaf with flour milled a week ago (ie aged 1 week as opposed to fresh) and the night before decided to make Champlain sourdough to see the difference between these two breads.

This is the first bake since returning from my business trip to Germany.  I had a nice trip, but unfortunately as usual I brought back the "Black Death" with me and it took me a good week to start feeling normal again, not to mention adjust to the East Coast time zone.

My wife has been dying to try making yogurt in the Instant Pot so after she finally made enough yogurt to feed a small army I decided to make use of some of it in a bread.

I noticed the only videos online showing recipes for sourdough were around 5-10 minutes. So I tried to do it in 3, let me know what you think, and feel free to share. 

Thanks 

Patrick

Here's another attempt at crumb embellishment in croissants after an interesting cocoa experiment last week. Note the lower right croissant. The idea here is to have a bit of fun with the beautiful 'honeycomb' crumb that croissants produce (if done well). I wanted to see if a contrasting color could be incorporated into the lamination. The first attempt involved simply coating the dough in cocoa power and then performing the folds. That turned out to just complicate things as cocoa is so dry that nothing sticks.

This weekend’s bread was mostly spelt with a rye starter and some of last week’s leftover bread (altus). 

400 gr whole spelt (fresh ground)

270 gr water

6 gr salt

80 gr refreshed rye starter ( 100% hydration)

100 gr altus*

-autolyse spelt and water about 2hrs

-mix in starter, rest a bit, mix in salt and altus

-bulk ferment with occasional folds about 5 hrs

-preshape,shape proof in fridge overnight

-bake at 475 F covered for 20 min, 425 F uncovered for 20 more mins

This is a repeat of the Spiced Raisin Sourdough that I did a few weeks ago with a few changes, of course. ;-) I switched out half of the golden raisins for cranberries and I changed up the method quite a bit. It was a pain in the neck and made for a very long day (I started at 7:30 am and finished at 8 pm) but I think the results are worth it!

Recipe:

112 g red fife wheat berries

1000 g unbleached flour (split into 880 g and 120 g portions)

50 g freshly ground flax

179 g cranberries

179 g golden raisins

I wanted to compare the effect of using bran in the levain vs whole flour.  So on Wednesday morning I weighed out a little more spelt and rye berries than I needed (allowing for slight loss during milling) for each levain build then milled them.  I did this a little differently than usual.