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A close friend is having a dinner party today down here in Fort Lauderdale so I offered to bring rolls.  I’m almost out of bread flour to in order to ensure that I have enough for one last bake I’ve been adding some whole wheat to my bakes, even for company.  I switched Alan’s starter to whole wheat and it seems fine with it.  Instead of a bread flour tangzhong I used whole wheat.  Another change I made is that I added the butter to the tangzhong while cooking it.

 I had some leftover cheesy grits from a recent brunch at one of our favorite local places and it needed to go someplace besides my belly.  I decided to add some egg yolks and a mixture of freshly milled high extraction flours similar to my last bake.  

Anyone knows why this happens? I get a huge tunnel through the whole loaf, at the top, just below the crust. I use 347gr equal parts of flour and water, 7gr salt, and 3gr yeast. I fermented the dough for around 4hrs, along side some coil folds before finishing bulk fermentation. It was baked in a convectional oven at 220C*. 

Had a weekend down at Frankland in the Great SotherN district of WESTERN AUSTRALIA picking a single row of Pinot Noir grapes for some Home Made Wine for personal use. Hand picked and foot maserated. After we had that sorted  and the yeast pitched onto the skins fruit and juice  we decided to pick some Sauvignon Blanc from the vines we decapitated two years ago and hopefully will be back into full production next year. We crushed and pressed these grapes the juice filling 23 litres into the fermenter and yeast pitched in and the air lock in place.

Today's bake: Sourdough Bread with a Prebiotic Soaker

Source: CalBeachBaker/Michael Kalanty

Note: Prebiotic soaker, Med sourness -29 % prefermented flour

Discussion:

I though that I would post this 1st attempt of my regular sandwich sourdough bread with the newly added prebiotic soaker. I've taken the idea and the ratios from Michael Kalanty's online sourdough pizza with prebiotic soaker recipe and adapted it to this bread recipe.

Did you know that the price of pecans is much less here in the south compared with in Canada?  So I decided I’d try making pecan sticky buns that I’ve seen but never eaten.  To bring a bit of Canada to them I’ve added maple syrup to the topping.  The rest of the bun is pretty standard cinnamon rolls.  I’ve used my usual stiff sweet levain to keep the sourness in check.  I’m still fully hand developing the dough so decided to try an experiment.

 I love adding cooked rice to bread.  It adds a nice flavor and texture to the final loaf.  For this bake I used Organic Jade Pearl Rice that was cooked with some chicken stock.  I also added some mashed potatoes for some extra softness.  

I was grating a semi sweet chocolate bar and as usual the loose chocolate gets magnetized and starts to creep up my steel box grater and threatens to make a big mess when trying to get the bits where they should be.  So I thought...would putting a magnet on the grater make it worse or tame these wee dancing flakes?  

This batch of caramel apple penettone is the most successful to date - 18 cm high, 1000g exactly. This is the Roy recipe, which is a lower egg yolk formula. My lievito madre has been out of storage for about two weeks.

For the first week, I fed the LM only once a day at 1:1:.40, keeping it at room temp for 12 hours and refrigerated for 12 hours. I found that this had the tendency to increase acidity very slowly, moving me toward target. 

Today's bake:  Friendship Loaf

Source: Sourdough Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More - Sarah Owens

Note:Increased TDW from 1.621kg to 2.0kg

Discussion:

Another recipe from Sourdough Recipes for Rustic Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More by Sarah Owens.