I've put myself to the test.  I plan to summon 10 loaves of my own at home, freshly baked, every Saturday Morning, to bring to my local farmer's market as trade. This is week one for me.  As some already know I am a full time professional baker and believe it or not the last thing I want to do on the weekend  is bake. Actually as I've aged I prefer to cook opposed to bake on my free time.  I used to bake at home endlessly but with a full time job doing such that teetered off.  I'm back.  I see all of the wonderful stuff created from home on this site, much of which blows away professionally made product.  I want in.  I'm gonna be a part-time home baker.  I bet I'll need some advice from those of you with more skills baking bread in rinky dink home ovens with pots and pans and the such.  I've done it and done it well but I'm only a novice.  Most of my breadwork is with commerical tools, and in some cases top notch.  

Also my plan is to be spontaneous and just kinda wing a new loaf every week.  This week I've made up what I'll call the "Super Grain Sour Wheat"  I did some reading on super grains this week and thought well those should be a soaker for a loaf of bread.  So I made a levain of Central Milling High Mountain High Protein, Central Mill freshly ground whole wheat, Central Milling freshly ground whole rye, starter, and h20.  This was built off of a 100% cold living white starter and essentially a second build 8 hours after it was previously fed 1:2::2. 

Soaker:

3 oz toasted millet 3 oz, toasted buckwheat (kashi), 3 oz toasted kamut, 3 oz toasted quinoa

Levain

3 oz Rye

7 oz Wheat

10 oz HP

20 oz H20

10 oz White Starter 100%

--------------------------------------------------------------

Rise 8 hours.  

Final Dough

85 oz HP

20 oz Wheat

70 oz H20

3 oz  Sea Salt

4 oz  H20 #2

----------------------------------------------------------------

Autolyse 2 hours 

Add levain, salt, soaker and mix on speed one (uh oh super wet) 5 minutes

Turn to speed 2 (medium)  5 minutes (looking better)

Turn to speed 3 hi about 5 minutes (phew it came together)

Bulk Ferment plan: 3 1/2 hours (3-4 s+f) at 20 minutes intervals but I'll let the dough lead

Shape/ partially proof (2-3 hours) Retard overnight

Wake up early set up my oven and bake in 3-4 waves.   cool down. make sure its not terrible and then head to market

I'll add some pics of dough and the such as I go.  

I'm mostly sharing this to motivate me to do this and to document some of my findings.  Hey I bet I'll make a few good loaves before the markets over in November.  

Happy Baking

Josh

I've been trying Jim Lahey's No-Knead recipe and am giving a sourdough version a whirl.  Rather than letting it do it's 2 hour second proofing in a floured/wheat bran dusted towel I'd like to use an old metal colander than has a ton of little holes.

Do I still have to use a towel (cotton/linen etc) for it to sit in or can I just apply some olive oil to the colander and then liberally dust it with flour or wheat bran and then place the dough in that and cover with the towel?

Thanks...

Ron

Hi All,

Can anyone here tell me the ratio of freshly pulled brewer's yeast from beer making to dry measurement in baking? I have the opportunity to get some from a local micro~craft brewery but don't even know where to start experimenting with it.

Thanks,

Toni

Hi,

I am new to baking bread and have been using many of the recipes in Ken Forkish's new book.  The bread has been turing out fantastic and I have learned a lot in the last two months.  I have a question regarding starters though.  I now have a mature starter from the Forkish book but I would like to try the Tartine Country loaf.  Do i need to start over and create a starter using the forumla in the Tarine book or can I use my mature starter from the Forkish book.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I'm sure other people have reviewed this, but I'm so pleased with this product I had to create a post.  I cultivated my own sourdough starter about 4 years ago.  I don't know if it's because I'm in suburban Denver (6000 ft) or what, but I could NEVER coax any flavor out of my breads.  2, 3 day retards, maybe a little...definitely nothing like california breads. In fact, I could really not tell the difference between my SD breads and straight breads.  Even poolish were better.  I tried once adding citric acid to my bread, great flavor, but wrecked gluten a bit.

I was thumbing through the KAF catalog recently and came across the "Sourdough Flavor"...decided it was worth a try.  I made Peter Reinhardt's straight dough baguettes using 1/2 the recommended amount of KAF Sourdough Flavor (yeah, they try to oversell I think).  Holy cow...I was blown away!  Flavor was amazing, texture was spot on, color was a beautiful golden brown (my SD's always came out more of a grayish-brown).  I love it so much I decided I was sick of caring for my starter and tossed it (a little sniff, since it was a living thing). 

Love the stuff!    

With Memorial Day neigh, we needed some hot dog buns for some sausages and brats we will start the weekend off with tonight for dinner.   Who better to come up with a recipe for them than none other than our resident Hot Dog and my German baking Apprentice - Lucy!

She got in the mood doing slap and folds for the Japanese Black Rice bread earlier today while singing her favorite Japanese cowboy song -  ‘Yippee Oh Kiyae, I am a Japanese Hot Dog, Bun Making Sandman.’  Yes, it is even truer that she got into this song more doggedly while doing the slap and folds for these buns.  She is incorrigible.

 In any event, we made a poolish and YW levain over 12 hours.   After a short 1 hour autolyse, we mixed it all together, did the singing, slapping and folding over 10 minutes and then let the dough rest for 15 minutes before doing the first of 3 sets of S& F’s in the bowl.

After a 30 minute rest we shaped the dough into 5 tight little logs a spiral bun and a Franz Joseph roll just in case a hamburger happened onto the gill with the Hot Dogs over the weekend.   After proofing for an hour and a half on parchment paper laid out over a plastic cutting board substituting for a peel, we thought they looked fairly proofed.

The oven was already hot from the Japanese Black Rice bread so all we had to do was reconstitute the lava rock and CI skillet steam and get to baking.  The rolls, after egg washing, went in at 400 F for 2 minutes and then 6 minutes at 375 F before removing the steam.  We then turned the oven down to 350 F convection this time and baked the rolls for an additional 12 minutes while rotating them on the stone every 5 minutes,

After a total of 20 minutes, the rolls looked nice and brown so out they came to a cooling rack.  We brushed some milk on them to make sure that they crust would be soft as possible.   They puffed up beautifully in the oven and the Toadies really come through in the smell department.  Lucy can’t wait to eat these buns with a nice variety of sausages for dinner.  Will post a crumb shot then.

The nuns were very good and they worked out well even if a little on the large side - just more room for pickled, onions, cucumber and Hatch chilis.

Happy Memorial Weekend!

Formula

A search on TFL on spraying the oven for steam generated plenty of results...

...seems most use the caking tray or pan + ice cup or hot water approach. Problem is, right now my oven only has two racks so I need both of them for trays...

I thought I'd try the spray bottle to "get my feet wet." I have an electric oven. My question is....while I understand that many spray the WALLS of the oven to generate steam...can I just spray the bread DIRECTLY?

How is the heating element on the bottom going to respond to sprayed water??

Also...if I want to crank out more from my home oven...can I add more racks and just rotate top to bottom at the half-way point?? (one door opening of the oven)....or will they come out all different colors and levels of done-ness?

Thank you!

I'm brand new to this site and a relatively new bread baker. Started with Artisan Bread in 5 recipes but gave up after a few years because I couldn't get good sandwich bread in loaf pans. Have bought a Bosch Compact Mixer to take care of kneading (I have arthritis in wrists) and have successfully made King Arthur Flour's pain de mie recipes, but I'm trying to find a good pumpernickel and a good rye bread recipe for loaf pans.

Checked out Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book from the library and would like to try the Petaluma rye recipe but I have two questions: does anyone know if this will work in loaf pans? What size would you recommend? What temp and time for baking?

Second question is that there seems to be an error in the recipe: she says something about adding "remaining flour"--but there's no indication anywhere that the flour should be divided up. If you've made this recipe, how do you work around that?

I appreciate the help! And if you've got an easy pumpernickel recipe that would work for loaf pans, I'd appreciate it. (By "easy" I mean that I don't want to make altus or anything like that.)

After Evon’s post of her bread with Japanese Black Rice in it, we knew it had to get to the top pf the bake list like Hanseata’s Wild Rice bread did when it appeared.  We had run across some of this rice a couple of months ago at Sprouts and had cooked it for dinner.  We knew it would end up in bread eventually and Evon’s post was the impetus.

The question was what kind of bread to put it in?  My apprentice went back and looked at our take of the Karin’s wonderful Wild Rice Bread and quickly knew that we would do something similar to it, perhaps not as dark or complicated.

Since I started medicating my apprentice with Sylvia’s Dog Bones, she isn’t as determined or anal as usual - even though she has taken to licking the glow in the dark, black light intensified picture we have of Elvis performing in Las Vagas.   Here was that bake:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/28806/hanseata%E2%80%99s-wild-rice-sd-w-yeast-water-multi-seeds-prunes-beer-and-sprouts

Here is Karin’s original post :

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/24092/wild-rice-sourdough-bread-ended-cold-war

Here is Evon’s inspirational bake, if a little dark, : Sprouted Organic Wild Black Rice SD Bread

It isn’t often we have a new bread ingredient like Japanese Wild Rice but Evon’s bread also had edamame in it – a second ingredient we have never seen used in bread before.  And as luck would have it, we had 3 kinds of edamame in the pantry and freezer.  We had fresh shelled edamame in the freezer. Wasabi dried edamame (my favorite after a few beers) and regular dried edamame.

You can tell we eat it a lot around here since it is my daughter’s favorite veggie.  We decided to be our normal conservative self when it comes to baking, as opposed to my apprentice’s solution for cleaning tile grout or magnesium rims on fine, if old, motorcycles.  So, we went with the non Wasabi dried edamame even though the black rice is Japanese.  You just can’t make apprentice’s think after leading them to water.

We sprouted the black rice and thought we had killed it when we forgot it was soaking and let it go for 8 hours before draining and putting them between damp paper towels.   But the rice loved it and after 2 days had sprouted well.  My apprentice was especially thrilled since this was her first time sprouting any kind of rice.

We did the standard (3) 4 hour levain build by putting all of the whole multi-grains in the levain.  Since it was white flour in the dough, we autolysed it for 1 hour only with the VWG, Toadies, red and white malts.  Once the levain and autolyse came together we did 10 minutes of slap and folds.

My apprentice sang one of her favorite tunes while doing the S& F’s - an Oriental cowboy song called - ‘Yippee Oh Kiyae, I am a Japanese Hot Dog, Bun Making Sandman.’  I reminded her that we wouldn’t be making hot dog buns till later in the day but she was in the groove and just wouldn’t be stopped with her being a hot dog and Japanese rice in the mix.  I’m guessing it won’t be the last time I hear this odd tune today.

After a 15 minute rest we did 3 sets of S& F’s on 15 minute intervals and added the edamame, black rice sprouts, ground non aromatic and aromatic seed variety and prunes on the first set.  By the 3rd set they were well distributed.  After another 15 minute rest, we divided the dough in half, shaped each and placed them into rice floured baskets and then into used plastic trash can liners.

After a 30 minute rest on the counter the baskets were placed into the fridge for an 18 hour retard.  By the next morning they had risen well in the fridge.  They came out of the cold for one hours to warm up before we fired up Big Old Betsy with Sylvia’s and David’s Patented Steaming Combo.

It took 45 minutes for the oven to get to 500 F including the 20 minutes for the top and bottom stones to get to that temperature lagging 20 minute behind.  We really cut back on the rice flour this time and worried that the dough would stick to the baskets but they came out no worries after a rap on the parchment covered peel.  A quick slash and into the oven they went.

After 2 minutes of steam at 500 F we turned the oven down to 465 F for a further 10 minutes of steam.  After removing the steam, we turned the oven down to 450 F, convection this time and let the bread finish baking to 205 F on the inside while rotating the bread ever 5 minute on the stone.  Total baking time was 27 minutes with 15 of it without steam.

It browned up, bloomed out had a few blisters and an ear where we tried to get one.  I like the color of this bread and the pattern that the baskets put on them.  They smell like they will be tasty if not delicious.  Have to wait for the crumb shot till after lunch .

The crumb is soft, light, open and moist.  The taste is totally unique and unlike Hanseata's Wild Rice bread.   We really like this bread.  the dried edamame will be a routine bread ingrediant from now on - we love the mouth feel and taste of them in thsi bread very much.   We love rhe contrasting ncolors and textures of teh crumb - very appealing!  It is another fine bread of late and a shout out goes to Evon for her inspiration and fine post of her bread.  One more crumb picture for Lucy!

Formula

hello everyone,

this is my first post on this site, I hope I am putting this question in the right place. 

I am looking at making some challah this weekend and I was wondering how long fresh baked bread lasts for. Is there anything I can do to make it last longer? 

Thank you for your help!