Blog posts

Sourdough Upside Down Banana Brandy Cake

Profile picture for user Anne-Marie B

This recipe uses the starter you were going to discard when feeding your starters. It is a tasty, moist cake that is not very sweet. The bananas are placed in a caramelised sugar and brandy sauce before the batter is dolloped on top. The original recipe used bourbon, but I had some brandy on hand, in preparation for making plum puddings. I used my discarded rye starter and wholemeal flour to give it more colour and texture. I also baked it in a ring pan instead of a skillet. It is a great combination of flavours and I may try it with apple wedges or pears in future. 

A very different sort of bake today!

Profile picture for user leslieruf

was thinking about what bread to bake, BBGA spreadsheets that I have set up but not yet tried, so started my levain build and things just took off at a tangent from there.

Today's bake: Lemon and raspberry muffins and mocha chocolate chip cookies.

feel good now! :)

Leslie

Seeded SD from 86% extraction whole grain wheat flour

Profile picture for user joc1954

Just want to share the result of one of the experiments I have recently done.

I was testing what kind of bread I get if I take 1000g of wheat grains and mill them and then sift out only the bran. I got about 86% extraction flour. Recipe was simple: 15% mature levain from same flour, 2.5 hour BF with S&F every 30 minutes, dough temp 28dC, , divide, preshape, 30 minutes bench rest, final shape and immediate retard, baking after 8 hours direct from fridge. Seeds: crushed flax and sesame added one hour in BF,  85% hydration.

Country Brown success

Profile picture for user Lazy Loafer

Yay, The FWSY Country Brown turned out beautiful! I did fudge the recipe a bit. I cut down on the initial hydration and then added water back in when I was happy with the consistency of the dough, so not sure of the final hydration but the dough was very soft and stretchy. I used fresh hand-milled stone-ground flour for the whole wheat portion (about 38% overall) so I wasn't sure how much water it would absorb. The grain was hard red spring wheat from a local farmer, and the flour smelled wonderful!

A few enriched sourdough bakes

Toast

In the spirit of the holidays I've been experimenting a little with enriched sourdough breads. A couple months ago I adapted a TFL formula from txfarmer for sourdough pumpkin hokkaido milk bread. I really love the texture of this style of bread, and have found that if I use the stiff levain quite young (6-8 hours), the resulting tang is barely distinguishable. (If I want more of a tang I'll use the levain when it's around 10-12 hours old.)

Pizzaaah! Take six.

Profile picture for user Skibum

Well I now have baked through a bag of 00 flour and absolutely love the pizza crust it makes! Of course the two grocery stores in my small mountain town no longer carry 00 flour. Fortunately I found an on-line source here in Canada to mail order 00 flour: gourmetwarehouse.ca.  Whew!

The dough for this pizza had been refrigerated for at least 5 days and still made an excellent result. I have taken a page out of Ken Forkish's book and finish baking the pizza under the 500F broiler which chars parts of the crust and finishes things off nicely.