I've been baking not blogging!

I got a couple of books for Christmas: PR's Artisan Breads Every Day and Jeffrey Hamelman's Bread. Both are great books, but I'm especially excited about the low-knead sour dough formulas in Hamelman's book.

I made Hamelman's straight dough French bread. It had terrific flavour (remarkably so for a straight dough) and looks pretty good too!

Stretch and fold and a bit of rye

I've heard about 'stretch and fold', a method which allows you to develop dough without having to knead it. I came across a tutorial on it and decided to give it a shot.

I made PR's BBA basic sourdough, straight from (whole wheat) starter/"barm" (no firm starter) using mostly white flour and a bit of rye. I leant my scale to a friend, so I was working by volume; consequently I'm not really sure what the hydration was, but I think it was a bit on the high side.

Stretch and fold is definitely way less work than kneading! Unfortunately, I don't think the three stretch and folds mixed the dough well enough. You can still see some streaks in the crumb where the starter isn't fully incorporated with the flours. I also think it's a bit under-baked. But whatever. It tastes pretty good and I really like the addition of the rye!

Potato, cheddar, and chives

Today I tried the potato, cheddar, and chives bread from PR's BBA. I was a bit unsure about some parts of this recipe. The potatoes were supposed to be chopped coarsely, which made for a very odd kneading experience as the bits of potato sometimes got squeezed out of the dough... Also, I only used about 1/4 to 1/3 of the recommended amount of chives, because the recipe seemed to be calling for too many.

The loaves came out bigger than I expected. So big in fact, that they didn't fit on my baking stone! So the ends of one of the loaves were falling off the edge of the stone. (You can kind of see the problem in the loaf on the left; it droops down and is burnt on the end. I think I'll cut those bits off...)

Thanksgiving bread

I made a big loaf of bread for Thanksgiving. It's my typical sourdough loaf: a lean dough with in this case a mix of sifted whole wheat and white flour. This is by far my biggest loaf, at about three pounds of dough. I think it was a bit too big for my banneton (the dough was cresting well above the top of the banneton while proofing).



S. demonstrated that she is in fact white by purchasing some ornamental gourds. We demonstrated we're white by having dinner with a brown girl.

The bread got lots of oohs and ahhs but not much of it got eaten because sooooooomebody made a turkey...

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.