baking again

 Its been a year since i took up retirement and quite truthfully i've never been busier, but i do recommend it.

I actually got around to doing some baking, my sour dough stockpile back at my old work place had all been used up in my abscence and none saved for the future, which was a shame as it had been going for quite a few years now.

Anyway i was able to buy a 5kg bag of Wallaby Bakers Flour that comes from Adelaide in South Australia. I was also able to buy a number of interesting flours from Kakulas Sisters in Fremantle, that being some Stone Ground Wholemeal, a Multimix grain flour and some Rolled Rye Flakes.

Compressed yeast was available at our local IGA store 114g costing just 80cents, so it was going to be fun being reunited with that old friend after years of dried yeast or sour dough culture to do the work.

The first dough was going to use a total flour amount of 500g so the quick reckoning of 1% is 5g  to make the rest of the calculations easy

 I took 50g of compressed yeast crumbled it into 200g of Flour and added 200ml of water  which makes a bit of a sponge to get things rolling along.

remembering that compressed yeast is 2/3 moisture compared to dry yeast, so more weight is required compared to dry yeast formulas

The remaining ingredients were added, 200g White Flour and 100g Stone ground Wholemeal brings the total flour to the 500g

Salt 10g (2%) Olive Oil 10g (2%) Egg 50g (10%) and  Natural non fat Yoghurt  from Tasmania 100g (20%) I bought the dough together in the Kenwood chef but tipped it out onto the bench to complete the dough formation by had it was then placed in a bowl covered with plastic wrap  and into my car which was out in the sun and makes a great warm spot for the bulk fermentation especially these cold mornings, only 17 degrees in the kitchen but almost perfect 28 in the car.

The dough was then ready after a fairly quick one and a half hours BF

It was knocked back  divided into two  handed up and allowed about 10 minutes recovery time  and shaped into two boules placed on a baking tray and into a plastic shopping bag tent and back into the car  to proof it was then washed with a cornflour starch wash and seeded and scored  it went into a gas hot oven, initially with no fan force for about 10 minutes and then the fan was switched on for the remainder of the bake.

Overall quite satisfied with the resulting bread for me it has a different smell when baking very happy that it had a nice texture that didn't tear when being buttered, had good flavour and colour also made beautiful toast too.

three more breads to blog coming soon all with the compressed yeast, I had a busy week with that 114g of yeast!

Multigrain  with  yoghurt

50% Wholemeal  with Dark Ale and Rolled Rye Flakes

and a White with Italian Semolina

kind regards  Derek