Blog posts

OK first blog entry here. About time I start documenting my bakes so I have some record of progress...

Mostly my bakes are for my weekly sandwich and other common uses (toast, etc). I've played around with a few flours and one reason to start blogging these is so i can keep the experiments straight. Most past bakes have been all or almost all bread flour with some whole wheat here and there. 

Today's bake is another using my sour raisin yeast water as the predominant leavening.  I also added in a bit of starter at the final mix because the RYW poolish seemed a little sluggish.  This was also an overnight cold retard during bulk.  I've made this once before at 30% whole grain, so I bumped it up to 40% for today.  I think I could go up to 50% and get similar results, but not using the cold retard (or I would have to go into cold retard sooner).  The dough looked good after the cold retard and during shaping, but it was starting to lose steam and dough stre

Third in my series of polenta breads each different from the previous.  This third loaf instead of either cooked polenta or saccharified polenta, I used cooled cooked polenta and then held it at 135-140°F after being mixed with koji rice for 14 hours.  I’ve made regular amazake before but this was my first time trying it with something other than cooked rice.  So to understand what amazake is you need to know what koji rice is.  Koji rice is rice that has been inoculated with aspergillus oryzae.  This incredible mold has so many food related uses.

After coming across Benny's Red Miso and Furikake post, I knew I had to try it!

Still struggling with bakers percentages, so omitted the miso for this first try... Just in case things ended up too salty.

Some things that I did differently as well (Sorry Benny!):

- Did not laminate in the furikake. Added in at my 2nd set of coil folds during BF
- Followed the flour values from one of The Bread Code's recipes (this has worked very well for me!)
- Added in diastatic malt

Maurizio Leo has quite a nice "Stout country recipe" on his web site, although he has promised an improved version for some years (as he did note that the bread could be better with more beer in the recipe).

This is a bread recipe from a local baker here in Toronto who teaches baking Centennial College, Matthew James Duffy.  I made minor changes to it and put it into the spreadsheet.  This is my first run at this, and probably won’t be the last if it tastes as good as it smell. Based on the cracks on the sides of the loaf I suspect this is under fermented a bit.  We’ll see tomorrow when I slice it, given the amount of rye I suspect it will benefit for at least an overnight rest.

Have always been curious about the widely-raved porridge loaf and decided to give it a try!

This version is a mix of The Bread Code's last sourdough recipe and The Perfect Loaf's take on tartine's porridge loaf, because:

1. I am terribly afraid of high hydration recipes. Have had past experiences where i have broken down in tears after trying to slap and fold/ handling an extremely wet dough.

The final request for the long weekend was a basic "white" sourdough that would be sized well for a toaster.  I decided to make a blonde with cross loaf scoring to make it lengthen instead of spread and bloom.  I do like the look of the long score with a big bloom, but I must say there's something to be said for the "clean" look of this scoring too.  

I was due for a starter refresh, so in this case, I used starter discard (6-hour feed discard) as seed instead of building a levain.

In planning meals for the week we decided that one night we wanted to just have a nice sandwich for dinner. A request was put in for an oat bread of some kind. Not having a go to recipe for this of course it was time to scour the fresh loaf. I ran across this beautiful post from Chelseasf and decided it was the way to go. I took her recipe and followed it but the hydration was way too high yet again. This is a trend I have seen in the Tartine recipes.

Anis Bouabsa baguettes have been very popular on TFL over the years and I realized that I’ve only baked them three times so far.  Only once plain, another time with a sesame seed coat and then a third time with chocolate (this was so good).  Since there’s been chatter about Bouabsa baguettes recently I thought I’d try a fourth bake.  I so seldom bake with IDY I was very anxious about over proofing.  I don’t think they are over proofed but I do think my scores were a touch shallow.