Blog posts

 alfanso-style.

Friends paid a visit last week from the other side of the peninsula.  And I baked them some bread.  Jim is the extraordinarily talented chef of his own small restaurant and does indeed like my bread, so I was pleased to provide him and Donna with two favorites.  The remaining batards sent home with them.

Following on from reading Trevor's Crumb Mastery I continue my quest to improve the crumb on my bread and up my skill level with wet dough and shaping.  We had eaten the Hamelman 5 grain levain so the freezer was nearly empty of bread.   Trevor had mentioned his "Premix" method so decided to have a go at Champlain sourdough, a 70% hydration.  should be a piece of cake!  yeah right! 

I made enough dough for 2 x 800 g loaves & 1 x 600 g loaf

 So 7:30  pm I weighed the flours 

I don't care for really large holes, the mayo spills out and there is no bread in the bread

Trying to bake a 50-50 fresh whole wheat-bread flour 75% hydration lean bread daily this week to improve technique and experiment with length of bulk ferment, freq of folds, etc. 

First one is pretty nice. Slightly flattened. Will add another late fold in tonight’s.

I have been making sourdough way in the past and frequently in past 7 months. I put it to rest in refrig 4 weeks ago and when trying to revive I must have killed it. I tried to hasten warming by putting jar of sourdough in hottish tap water. It never woke up.

I have a spare  starter from my son.

Can I bake an ordinary loaf of bread with yeast and killed sourdough. This is a tragedy, the killed sourdough starter is expanded so we are lookimg at 3+ cups and 36 hrs in room temp covered. 

This is a copycat version of Bread1965‘s loaf from his Blame CNN post. I enjoyed the loaf he gave so much that for this weekend, this was the loaf to make! I tweaked the method and the amount of Levain to what works for my schedule but I tried to be as faithful as possible to the ingredients. 

This makes 3 approximately 650g baked loaves. 

This is my second tartine sourdough loaf with 70% hydration. 

My first loaf was not shaped properly, the skin of the loaf was torn and cannot hold the shape. This time I use the bench knife to shape and it much better than my first time. 

However, the crumb in the bottom is too dense, I don't how to correct this issue. My loaf was baked straight from the fridge without being "relaxed" at room temperature. 

I have a small deck oven with maximum heat for both top and bottom is 300 C. After 20 minutes, I turn down to 250 C for the last 25 minutes. 

I've been wanting to make a purple sweet potato loaf for a while now because purple sweet potato is my favorite kind of potato. In this bread, I used a TON of potato puree and a lot of cornmeal, and it gave me a really beautiful loaf. The oven spring on this loaf was amazing, but the crumb is dense and cake-like. The purple sweet potato gives off a really nice floral taste and the texture of the crumb is almost creamy. Tastes even nicer the next day.

I cut into while it was still a little hot, which disturbed the crumb pattern in this picture, but look at this color!

Sitting beside these 3 baguettes, why yes it is but before anyone rushes to judgment these are my usual schtick of yeasted loaves. Just wanted to advertise the fact that this starter is now mature enough to start baking more natural yeasted loaves. This is really a shout out to alfanso so he knows they are on the way. Was hoping last week the starter would be ready but it was just too young (just a week old).