Buckwheat Rye

This is an example of a bread that looked really unpromising at every stage and has turned out to be one of the most delicious I've ever made. In shape it is much more like a pancake than a loaf, but it is chewy and crusty and has a deep, complex, slightly smoky flavor. The flour is 350g white (including the starter), 200g buckwheat (all of which fermented overnight) and 50g rye. I added commercial yeast in the morning when I mixed the final dough because I wanted to bake early. I also added way too much water, which probably accounts for the massive spread, but in my opinion if you don't care too much about shape too much water is not a problem. Too little and you get a tight dough that is (to me) repellent to work with; too much and you end up with a nice chewy interior.

When the Bread Doesn't Rise

I don't understand bread. This dough had so much rising power in the bucket it almost burst the lid. And yet, in the oven, almost nothing. A modest puffiness at best. Why? I'm sure there are answers, but I don't know them. The good thing is that, impressive rise or no, this is one of the tastiest loaves I've made in a while (100 g white, 100g sprouted spelt, 400g whole wheat).

Clamshell Bread

I think it looks like a clamshell or like a French macaron. Either way it's delicious; half white, half sprouted spelt flour. I'm thinking my ideal flour to water ratio is 2:1. I'm also learning that in addition to making bread palatable (to me) salt makes the crust color and crisp properly.

Sourdough

Here is the latest in my Anarchiste series of loaves. This is delicious, with a wonderful chewy crumb and a distinct sour tang. I attribute the latter to making the sponge with half white, half sprouted spelt flour; I find the more whole grain in the part of the dough that ferments overnight, the more sour flavor. In the end this loaf was composed of about 400g white flour (100 of which were the starter), 100g sprouted spelt flour, and 100g rye flour. I don't know how much water I used, but it was enough to make the dough impossible to work with, and beautifully textured once baked.

Auction Bread

A number of months ago I offered to include some bread in an auction for a local literary magazine. I never heard that it was included, and forgot all about it, until a few weeks ago when a colleague of mine came to my office and (in the kindest, least demanding way possible) told me he had bid on and won it. So when I made this loaf (half white, half whole wheat) I gave it away without tasting a crumb, a first for me. Hope it tasted as good as it smelled.

Here We Go

All better. This has 500g of flour: 50g rye, 225g white, 225g spelt; about half a cup of starter; maybe half a pack of yeast; and 10g salt. It's delicious, and as you can see shaped itself beautifully without slashing or any fancy business on my part.

Pancake Au Levain

So...what happened here? The levain was nice and peppy, so I think it must be the high percentage of non-glutinous flour I used; lots of buckwheat, rye, and whole wheat. It certainly smells good, though, so all may yet be well. If you're wondering why I didn't slash it it's because I am tired of disappointing slashes.

Pane di Altamura

This bread was well underway before I read around on the internet and discovered that I, like many others who tried it, had done almost everything wrong. Most importantly I used readily available semolina flour, when apparently what one wants is a much finer grind available only in Italy, or at least not readily here. Nothing daunted, I went ahead and baked. I haven't tasted it yet, but feel in any case that it is no small thing to have produced a loaf that looks as nice and smells as heavenly as this one does.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

Delicious, delicious bread. But I confess to tearing up when I took it out of the oven because I can't, no matter what I try, get it to burst and split in the oven like I see other people's loaves doing. Eating a few pieces of it cheered me up a bit.

For dinner last night we had lamb chops, okra, and curried (disgusting, watery, flavorless) acorn squash.

Chocolate Sour Cherry Bread

For the record: we had a brussels sprout and potato frittata for dinner. The real story, however, is clearly the pictured bread, which is from a recipe in Nancy Silverton's Breads from the La Brea Bakery. It's really just a normal sourdough, with the addition of cocoa, chocolate, dried cherries, and a little butter. It's delicious, and will, I predict, be better in a few days when the chocolate has bloomed. I like Silverton's book a lot, but wish she'd given measurements in grams rather than ounces. Bakers go metric for the same reason drug dealers do: when accuracy matters, it's the only way to fly.

Sesame Seed Kamut Levain

This loaf has 50% kamut flour, 45% bread flour, 5% whole wheat, and is filled with sesame seeds inside and out. It is extremely good today, and I think will be better tomorrow and the day after. I dearly love sesame seeds. I also love kamut flour, and don't understand why the recipes I read call for (in my opinion) cautious amounts of it. Berenbaum recommends 6% (!!!). I'm sure she has her reasons, and they probably have to do with maintaining authenticity in her recipe for pain au levain, but luckily for me I don't care about authenticity. I care about using lots of kamut. This is a good way to do it.

Whole Wheat Sourdough Miche

This is a really reliable loaf. I love the way the crust darkens, and then darkens again when I toast it.

Weekend Round-Up

A lot of cooking has happened here lately. When I thought back I realized that in one twenty-four hour period I produced, in addition to regular lunches and dinners, two loaves of sourdough (pictured), a double batch of waffles, several dozen chocolate chip cookies, and a big bowl of potato salad. I don't know what came over me, but it all seemed pretty natural at the time. The bread is mighty good; both loaves used the same starter, but the loaf on the right has about twenty percent kamut flour, while the one on the left has rye and whole wheat. Let's call them identical (conjoined!) twins raised in different environments. The pictured okra family represents our first harvest.

Scrambled Eggs

with Indian spiced okra and the pictured French Country Boule. I think it's fair to say that this is the best bread I know how to make, and one of the best I've eaten. It's pretty simple (white, rye, and whole wheat flours), and, in my experience, hard to mess up. If I had to quibble with this loaf I'd say I over-salted just a wee bit, and I still haven't mastered oven spring, but on the whole, if this is as good as my bread gets, I can happily live with it. I learned two things this round. The first is that I dislike a starter made with all whole grain; both the spelt starter I made a while ago and the whole wheat starter I baked with last week made a bread that was too tangy for my taste. Even in a whole grain loaf I prefer a starter fed mainly white flour. The second is that preheating the oven and using a baking stone are both unnecessary steps. Following the advice of a number of posters on The Fresh Loaf (link to the right) I baked this in a cold oven, on a baking sheet, and it is both delicious and indistinguishable from loaves I baked on the traditionally recommended searing-hot baking stone. Since I always found pre-heating to be just that one extra step that turned the whole thing into a chore, this is big news for me.

Now We're Getting Somewhere

Round two of the Kamut Levain. I did everything exactly the same, except for one thing: during the bulk fermentation stage (when one lets the dough rise for about four hours) I did two "letter fold turns." This involves dumping the dough out, stretching it into a rectangle, folding it in thirds, and returning it to the rising container. My internet research assured me that this would lead to better oven spring, and the internet was right. The oven spring was nice, and the crust color better, and I swear the bread tastes better too. So: letter fold turns. Not a dispensable step.

Kamut Levain

This is the Kamut Levain from Local Breads. It is extremely delicious; my spouse declared it my best yet and the best bread he's ever had. He's a man who is generous with his praise, but still; I'm pleased. The only thing is that it had pathetic oven spring, and I don't know why. Over-proofing? Flour without pep? I know the levain itself is nice and active, so I guess I'll just keep playing. I've reached the beginner's plateau where I've stopped being delighted when the bread works at all and have started to worry about how to make it work *right.* Good thing wrong bread tastes so good.

Whole Wheat Chia Seed Sourdough

This bread shows both how much I don't yet know about making bread, and how totally forgiving and rewarding a learning process bread making is. I followed (I use the word loosely) this recipe. I was interested because I'd had a bag of chia seed in my fridge for about six months; I bought it and then never figured out how to use it. It turns out that chia seed can absorb incredible amounts of water, and turns into a gel; added to bread dough, this results in a lot of moisture and nice flavor. Because I was winging things I ended up with a lot more water in my dough than I meant to have, and I clearly have no idea how to shape or slash a wet dough. Hence the blobular batards I ended up with. But so what? They taste wonderful.

Whole Wheat Mash Bread II

My first sub-par loaf of bread! Two things changed: I used a new brand of flour, and I only used half the starter I was supposed to. The problem is undoubtedly the second of those things, and basically what happens when one bakes on too little sleep. Bakes half-baked, so to speak. Never mind; even sub-par bread is still pretty good. We had it last night with grilled hake and a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, and red onions.

Whole Wheat Mash Bread

This is my first recipe from Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. It is also my first use of a "mash" in bread baking: a mash is a gelatinized mass of flour that has been hydrated and kept warm for a few hours until various enzymatic activities have had time to do their work. The bread also uses a nice big bit of starter. Let me tell you something: this is a crazy good loaf of bread, and you would never guess it's entirely whole wheat (a good thing). The color balance is off in the top photo; it is much more golden than it appears here (as you can see in the bottom photo).

Happy Father's Day!

We celebrated with homemade English muffins. I found the recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/whole-wheat-sourdough-english-muffins. The dough was very wet and (for me) kind of hard to work with, but it didn't matter. As usual, no matter how many things I did wrong, the end result was delicious for this starter-raised bread.