Finally bought an Emile Henry baguette baker... 1 year twice daily fed sourdough stater (785 g), 245 g H20, 545 g bread flour, 17 g salt... rise at room temp... and viola!
This was a special Halloween. It has been years since our daughter was home for one. The last time she was here we carved a Chi Oh Owl Pumpkin. This time we put Lucy on Pumpkin. It scared the heck out of her too!
Wow, it's been a while!
It's like my annual visit or what, ha ha.
So, it's Halloween and I am totally having fun with Jack every year!!
above photo: pumpkin dinner roles with chocolate custard cream in his mouth! ^ ^
and below: my standard, pumpkin fougasse as jack, black sesame fougasse as spider net, and some pumpkin cream twist role!!
The latest in my rye series is a Hamelman 70% medium rye with 30% WW, and a sizable pumpernickel soaker. My cracked rye was bug infested (doesn't move very quickly at the only bulk store that carries it); the pumpernickel was coarse. San Francisco Bay Area folks, if you know of a local source, please let me know.
This is a "do nothing" bread introduced from facebook's perfect sourdough group, where apart from mixing (could help myself from playing with wet dough so i did 2 folds at 1 hour interval) and 1 fold and loosely shaping, nothing else is needed. I was intrigued so i try tried a small batch of dough to make ciabatta. 90% hydration. 2 hours bulk at RT and 15 hours bulk in the fridge. loosely shaped n baked with steam for 15 mins.
Easy enough and i got a monsters inc ciabatta. Happy halloween!
Since receiving my copy of The Rye Baker, I've been baking and savoring its breads on a virtual basis. It is a beautiful book with many intriguing breads to try; far more than I sampled during the test bakes. Good as all that has been, the time has come to do some real baking. Actually, the time came last weekend but I hadn't made the necessary preparations, so I ran out of weekend before getting to bake anything from the book. Consequently, I made sure to have everything on hand and my schedule laid out so as to get serious about baking this weekend.
I was very pleased with last week's experiment so I decided to try using a single variety of whole grain flour with the same type of flake or grain. I also made an extra 2 loaves to give away to friends (posting on Facebook earns you people begging for bread. Ha ha!)
Last week, I went to a steak house with some work colleagues. This was not an ideal situation for me, only because I’m a vegetarian. The meatless main course options were severely limited. There was literally one choice, a roast vegetable dish.
It was a really delicious mix of roasted sweet potato, butternut squash, walnuts and pumpkin seeds topped with a generous amount of goat’s cheese, rocket and a sundried tomato vinaigrette/sauce/puree. To make it all even better, there was really great sourdough bread on the table!
Every autumn we have abundance of pumpkins in our garden. Most of them are Hokkaido pumpkins which have an orange skin and more yellowish meat. I usually use Hokkaido pumpkins for preparing pumpkin soup or pumpkin gnocchi with brown butter and sage leaves (one of the recent recipes is published here with a nice video), but this year I decided to make Hokkaido pumpkin bread with SD and sage yeast water combo.
