Blog posts

Still working away at my panettone here in the VT wilderness. I've adopted a consistent twice-daily feeding process for my Lievito Madre, and have made other adjustments in dough handling, pH measurements, proofing temperature, and baking process.

I am now seeing significantly more alveolation in the loaves, so apparently all of these things are contributing factors. 

This is the Candied Strawberry Chocolate Caramel panettone.  Here is a side-by-side with my bake of two weeks ago, the new bake is the top row:

This has been a long time coming but a couple of weeks ago I finally got around to making a 50% Emmer loaf (thanks to Ted’s prompting 😊).  It’s been a crazy few weeks getting everything sorted for a much awaited trip back to Europe to visit family. so to bread…

Bread flour 210 g (49.5%)

Malted four 2 g (0.5%)

Emmer 212 g (50%)

water 305 g (72%)

salt 8 g (1.8%)

Levain refreshed and left over night to ripen - I used 133 g 100% hydration starter (part of total dough weights above)

Latest gluten nebula discovery by JWST in my kitchen  :-D

A new member’s here to join the ‘lyse’ family. Autolyse, fermentolyse, saltolyse and now sourlyse. All recipe’s flour, water and sourwort (up to 30% baker’s percentage) roughly incorporated  together and left in the fridge (4C) for 18-24hours. The acidity of sourwort and cold environment guarantee there’ll be very small chance of any unwanted spontaneous activity to occur. The sourlysed dough is then left at ambient temp for 3-4hours to warm up and standard steps followed till bake.

Making SD YW T65/Semola pizza crusts in my Detroit pans. Prep with sauce and parmigiana and then par bake and freeze. Better than Costco 😂😬. The little one on my 40 yr old steel pan ( can’t get it anywhere anymore) will be gone almost immediately after coming out of the oven fully topped. Let me know if you want the best crust formula. 1700 g of yum

And it’s only Tuesday  

par baked goodness ready for freezer when cool

A variation of previous bakes. More pleased than ever with shaping and scoring…thank you TFL . This iteration has home milled 300 g spelt, 300 g Yecora Rojo and 400 g AP Arrowhead Mills flour. 40 g  rye storage starter used to make 280 g YW  and home milled rye levain at 100% hydration. I do not feed my stored starter prior to bakes and my stored YW hasn’t been fed in weeks. Both present with rapid growth so I have let them be. 

I baked another Sour Cherry Rhubarb Streusel Pie for dessert last night but this time not vegan and used my usual all butter pastry and butter in the streusel topping. This has quickly become my favorite pie this summer.  I love the tart sweetness of the cherries and the distinctive rhubarb flavour.  The almond extract brings out the cherry flavour while the lemon brightens everything up.

I plan to make a barley risotto with lemon ricotta, sun dried tomatoes and spinach for dinner and wanted a bread to go along with it.  It has been a long time since I made a plain old country sourdough so decided that would go well with dinner. I made small changes to my usual country sourdough recipe for this bake.  I went back to using a liquid levain instead of a stiff levain just because I hadn’t done a liquid levain in a long long time.

I've only made this a couple times.  It's a Finnish bread and a favorite in the local bakeries.  It makes great French Toast!  Traditionally, it's a 3-strand braid, but this is my second attempt making it with a 5-strand.

Makes two braids...

Levain
114g    AP Flour
74g     Water
0.5g    Active Dry Yeast
1)  Dissolve yeast in water.  Combine all ingredients and ferment at 70 deg F for 12-14 hours.

I just prepared my rye starter for an 8 week holiday. I took 10-gram of my ripe stiff rye culture and crumbed it using 100-gram whole rye. Air dried for a couple of days and stored in a clean old sock. It's now laid to rest in the cupboard.

When I get home in November, I'll rehydrate it into a paste and feed for a couple of days. Should be good to go :)

Cheers,

Gavin

We have friends staying over tomorrow night.  I am planning on baking a strata for breakfast on Sunday morning.  Because the strata requires an egg bread I decided that I couldn’t possibly just buy a grocery store challah for our friends’ breakfast.  So the decision was made to bake a delicious 50% WW SD Challah and push fermentation further.  This time I pushed the fermentation until the aliquot jar showed a full 190% rise at the time of baking.  At this point the poke test showed that the dough just slightly sprung back.