Hi Everyone and Happy 4th!
Finally, a little time to relax, spend time at home with my kitties, Daisy and Tillie (shown here)
I've been making pizza for years with very good results. A few years ago I got a wood fired oven, anticipating to up my pizza game to a point where my pizzas would be better than anything I could get outside of Naples, Italy. Until I followed a tip from Ken Forkish's book THE ELEMENTS OF PIZZA, great WFO pizza proved to be elusive.
The last batch of rolls I made were very rich so I wanted to make something a bit more lean this time. I omitted the cream cheese and changed up some of the flours and used whole eggs and olive oil in place of the cream cheese and butter.
They came out very tasty and while not as rich and buttery as the last batch, they still make great burger buns and sandwich rolls as well.
This week’s bake is a continuation of last week’s idea of taking loaves I’ve made before and upping the whole grain content. The fig, almond and sunflower seed SD I made I while back was next on the list, last time it was 20% whole grain.
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/45693/fig-and-almond-sd
This time I used pecans instead of almonds and sunflower seeds, because I found that the flavour of the almonds was a bit lost.
Formula:
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Usually Lucy comes up with a recipe and tells me what to do and then I do my best to execute her recipe wishes as closely as possible or risk having my ankles savaged by a wild beast, small in leg length. Then I tell you all about it. This time was a bit different.
Some may remember that I put out a call for interns to visit my bakery Bread Obsession this summer. I am sad to say that no interns applied. First, we got a lovely visit from exceedingly accomplished baker, Pat Roth, which she wrote about so eloquently here.
It's been a while since I baked with a Yeast Water starter and I now that cherries are in season and inexpensive I figured it was time to build one again.
It took a few days to bring the YW to life with a handful of cherries, water and a little honey. Once it was ready to use I built up a levain in 2 stages and used a nice combination of flours including freshly milled whole wheat and durum flour.
Naturally I needed to add some cherries to the main dough and figured some walnuts would make this a winner.
I was reading how knowledge has become ubiquitous. The shear mass of information makes knowing factual information not that valuable. The reason I was thinking about this topic is because I thought I had discovered something completely new. But the problem with new ideas is that they are doubted, so after thinking I decided to use the ideas to make something. Now I have a little thing called Recipe Genius that is the only recipe calculator that actually tells you the recipe you entered.
Decided to try out a new stone in the grill. First test, of course, bread.
Made a simple dough for safety, about 30% rye and tossed it on. Always need to re-learn the technique every year, but I think this stone is going to work just fine.
Ru007's post on her Sourdough with Polenta, Sunflower seeds and Pepitas motivated me to try her recipe since it looked amazing! I didn't have any Polenta but thought that cornmeal might be close enough and with her encouragement, I went ahead and used cornmeal.
The plan was to double her recipe and be done but my starter was 100% hydration as opposed to 80% like hers and my math got wonky when I started using the baker's percentages instead of the actual weights after I had soaked my cornmeal. No matter, I am really happy how it turned out.
Procedure:
