Banneton!

Hannah got me a banneton for my birthday!



It's 9 inches, which is supposed to be appropriate for a 1-2 pound loaf.

I tried it out tonight. The bread is nothing special. It's kind of PR's BBA French bread, without the pre-ferment, but with some whole wheat flour, and with some adjustments to the salt and yeast that might not have been the best idea. Whatever. It's a reasonable mixture of flour, salt, yeast, and water.



I'm really pleased with the look of this loaf. The ridges of the banneton came through nicely. And my scoring opened up well. I haven't baked a hearth bread with commercial yeast in ages; it really seems to give a dough that's so much easier to work with, which is I think why the scoring is better.

Hannah also got me a dough scraper, which is super useful. She's the best!

BBA Light Wheat

I haven't posted for a while because I've been baking mostly-whole wheat sour dough loafs similar to the last one I posted about. Today I wanted to do something a bit different.

I tried Peter Reinhart's light wheat bread from the Bread Baker's Apprentice. It's 33% whole wheat flour, the rest being white flour. The recipe gives the option of sugar or honey; I went with sugar because I don't think I have any honey.

It's a pretty easy one day recipe: mix, knead, wait, shape, wait, bake. And this is the result.



Edit:

And after letting it cool for a little over two hours... I'm a bit disappointed with the result. The flavour isn't terribly exciting, but maybe that's just what you get with a one-day bread. In fact, this loaf reminds me a lot of the rather blah whole wheat loaf I used to buy at a nearby bakery. In the future, for sandwich-style loafs, I think I'm going to stick with 100% whole wheat formulas.

Poilane

I tried making the Poilane style miche from BBA this weekend. Except I thirded the recipe because I just don't need such a huge loaf!

I refreshed my starter on Saturday morning and the made the firm starter Saturday evening. The firm starter needed to rise for 4-6ish hours, but unfortunately I forgot about it and left it out over night. Oh well. Then this afternoon I made the final dough. I used sifted whole wheat flour from Mountain Path, a small flour mill near Ottawa. The dough had much more strength than the sourdough I've made in the past directly from the mother starter, although I'm not quite sure why this is. As you can see in the photos below, my scoring actually worked this time, although I might have gone a bit far...

Also, we made pickles and strawberry jam.

BBA Challenge: Ciabatta

I'm back on the BBA Challenge! This week: Ciabatta. I made the poolish version, because poolish is just such an easy pre-ferment. This bread is very high hydration, which means it's not super easy to work with. As a result, you don't knead it in the traditional sense. Rather, after some initial mixing, you put it through a series of "stretch and folds". (Basically, you fold the dough over itself a couple of times.)

The end result looks like this:





I'm not super happy with the crumb structure. I was hoping for something more open, like the pictures in BBA that are more hole than crumb. Oh well, it still tastes great!

Sourdough

I haven't been keeping up with the BBA Challenge lately. The bread this week, challah, just didn't excite me. And I missed the casatiello last week, which I'm quite looking forward to. But today I just felt like making a regular loaf of bread.

I kind of followed the basic sourdough recipe in PR's BBA. I used 5 oz of my firm, whole wheat starter (I've created a white flour 100% hydration starter too, but it doesn't seem to be doing as well as the whole wheat one...), 10 (ish) oz of really nice white flour (from Mountain Path which I picked up yesterday), a teaspoon of salt, and about 6.5 oz of water. Mix, knead a bunch, wait 3ish hours, shape, wait 2ish hours, bake for 20ish minutes at 450F, steam at the beginning (although I lowered the temperature to about 375F after about 15 minutes because it was starting to get pretty dark). And here's what I got:



In just a few minutes I'm off to a Summer solstice picnic in Trinity Bellwoods Park, so I'll find out how it tastes then!

BBA Challenge: Brioche

I made the "rich man's" version of brioche. It has a lot of butter in it. 87ish percent of the weight of the flour! I made this in one day. After mixing the dough, I retarded it for about four hours, which is the minimum recommended time (it can also be left over night). I also didn't do a very good job of shaping it. The dough is super greasy and not much fun to work with. I ended up with a loaf that was a bit bigger on one end than the other (see Figure 1 below). Oh well...

It smells overpoweringly like pastry in the apartment right now, but we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what it tastes like.



In other news, the sourdough starter didn't get so much to eat while I was out of town... I fed it this afternoon, and there were some signs of life. I fed it again tonight; if it's bigger by morning we might have saved it!

BBA Challenge: No bagels for you!

This week's challenge is bagels! But I'm not going to be able to bake them. I'm writing this from the Indianapolis airport, which is remarkably comfortable and has wireless, but I can't bake here.

I've been in Bloomington for the past few days, and I'm off to Boulder until next Saturday. Hopefully I'll be able to bake next week's challenge---brioche---when I get home.