First Couche Loaf Experiment

As first tries go, this wasn't a terrible experience with my new couche. I ordered it from Amazon and it appears to be well made with the linen being stiff enough to fold around a loaf. There's still much to learn about shaping dough in order to make better use of the couche. I'll get there eventually.

This particular loaf had a bit of mashed potatoes added in place of some flour. I like the flavor from the addition of potatoes or potato flakes but do have some trouble guessing how to correct the hydration level when using the cooked potatoes. The tactile feel of the dough also seems to change but that may be my own lack of experience baking bread with potato. It's still worth doing again.

Starter
150 g at 100% hydration

Main Dough
270 g bread flour
80 g stone ground whole wheat
27 g mashed potatoes
230 g water at 85F
10 g kosher salt
All of starter

The summer time heat has returned with a vengeance, with daytime highs in the upper 90s, lots of pollen, other allergens, and poor air quality. Tomorrow may be the first time for a high temperature of 100F this year. If I have to work outside, it has to be done in the morning. There's a curious lack of birds at the feeders and in the neighborhood as well. I wish I had a lack of crabgrass in the lawn instead.

Some recent page views for my blog came from Norway and Hungary.

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Multi Flour Loaf

I'm hoping that it was a bit of whimsy that motivated me to use a little bit of this and some of that in this loaf because Mrs PG and I have enjoyed this one quite a bit. The couche I ordered from Amazon.com arrived today so the loaf I start tomorrow should take a different appearance from the many that were shaped for the brotform. I'm planning on looking up all the Youtube clips I can find on shaping batards for my newest acquisition for the tool box.

Starter
150 g at 75% hydration

Main Dough
240 g bread flour
80 g stone ground whole wheat
20 g whole rye
20 g Spelt flour
240 g water at 85F
9 g kosher salt
1 Tbs (15 ml) honey

Some visitors from Denmark and New Zealand stopped by for a visit to this blog in the past week.      

Multi grain (breakfast cereal) Boule

Mrs PG prefers that I use my oval brotform when baking bread but she was on the way to Omaha when it was time to shape this loaf. So I grabbed my floured towel and trusty colander for a change of pace boule. It has a healthy addition of  9 grain cereal from Montana Milling that was soaked and an almost sweet flavor from a lean dough. The oven spring was very good so I'm feeling pretty good about how it turned out.

Starter
150 g at 75% hydration, KAF AP flour

Soaker
70 g 9 grain breakfast cereal
57 g water

Main Dough
285 g bread flour
75 g stone ground whole wheat
240 g water at 85F
9 g kosher salt
All of starter
All of soaker


Lots of fine feathered friends at the feeders and in the yard this morning. There are a couple of hummingbirds flitting about the Rose of Sharon bush. There's titmouse pair and nuthatch flying back and forth from the feeder to the tree. We also have a brilliantly colored solo goldfinch trying to get a share of food from the finches, sparrows, and pine siskinds that are crowding onto every perch that has access to food. They're all very noisy or perhaps just full of songs this morning
Comments, humor, and questions are welcome. 

33 1/3 Loaf

I'm happy enough with my line of investigation on 360g flour loaves to continue for a while. There may be the occasional deviation into something off the wall for me but I can't help myself about that.

Anyways, I previously mentioned that I thought I may have been using too much dough for my brotform and now I'm fairly confident that I was right. The 360g loaves are similar in size to my 400g loaves at the end of proofing. I do need to tweak the hydration levels down but that's no big deal. Another pleasant result is that the texture of the crumb is turning out to be much softer and additional ingredients such as wheat germ or my 9 grain cereal only compliment the flavor and don't affect the texture very much if any. This isn't reinventing the wheel or something like that, only just another method in the tool box for building that better bread.

Starter
165g at 80% hydration, KAF AP

Soaker
24g wheat germ
16g water

Main Dough
240g bread flour
120g stone ground whole wheat
245g water at 85F
1 Tbs (15 ml) honey
9g kosher salt
All of soaker
All of starter


The weather has taken an unexpected turn to the pleasant for this corner of Kansas in August. If it continues on like this, as the forecast calls for, I may feel invigorated enough to wash and wax Mrs PGs car. It's really that nice. The color quality, if there is such a thing, of the sunlight is starting to change as well.  I think that if you're a photographer, you might know what I mean.

I took out the "English cucumber" plants a couple days ago in order to give the watermelon vines a chance to fill out the three watermelons that actually appeared this summer. The chile peppers remain an example of the vagaries of Kansas weather and why only the foolhardy or gamblers would put money into truck gardening in Kansas. The production levels coming out of my garden are quite convincing. In any case, the local supermarkets are promoting the arrival of Hatch, NM chile peppers and in my book, there may be a few that are better but I haven't found them yet so I'll stick with the Hatch when I want a chile at its best.

This week's guest of note on my blog dropped in from Thailand.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.
     

Multigrain(Breakfast Cereal) Sourdough

Don't be mislead by the less than sterling pictures today, this turned out to be one of my better looking loaves when viewed in person. It also tastes very good as well.

This is the second loaf in my series of what can be called my 360g loaves. I had been baking loaves with 400g total flour and decided to cut down on the total flour by 10% to see if the loaves would be easier to shape on a consistent basis. I also had suspicions that the overall weight was causing my loaves to flatten out between knocking them out of the brotform and the beginning of the oven spring period. My conclusion from yesterday's bake is that I was putting too much dough into the brotform, limiting the expansion of the dough. I'm not totally comfortable with the wording of that explanation but it seems to be a line of thought worth pursuing. A 360g loaf has a volume of dough after proofing that is really close to the volume of a 400g loaf. I haven't measured this with precision so I won't seek the Nobel Prize for that work.

The multi grain aspect of this loaf derives from the use of a 9 grain cereal mix equalling 22% of the flour by weight. The cereal was soaked in water for two hours.

Starter
170 g at 82% hydration, using KAF AP

Soaker
80 g 9 grain cereal
56 g water

Main Dough
270g bread flour
90 g stoneground whole wheat
245 g water at 90F
All of starter
All of soaker
9 g kosher salt

 The recent rains have made a great deal of difference to the health of the plants and grasses in the yard. It also seems that they've been a boon to the insects in the yard as well. The forecast calls for another 2+" of rain starting tomorrow afternoon. These rains aren't monsoon rains coming up from the US Southwest but after a period of drought, I can't discriminate against their origin.

Next year's garden may be a little different. I obtained a copy of  "Straw Bale Gardening" from the library. Not only does it make sense, it looks like it would lend itself to my garden very easily. If I can find the straw next spring, I may plant half the usual garden in straw bales to see how well it works out. If it can make gardening easier and more productive, then I'm for it.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.     .

French Country Loaf Hybrid, An Experiment

I don't have my usual full length shot here because Mrs PG got to the loaf before I got around to taking pictures. Yes, she is still alive, she's been forgiven, and we're still married as well. After all, bread is meant to be eaten.

The experiment part of this bake was to reduce my total flour weight by 10% to see if I could get a better looking loaf with the brotform. I'm OK with those results for the first smaller loaf. The hybrid part of the experiment was using 1/8 tsp active dry yeast added to the dough during mixing. I admit that after starting late, I didn't want to stay up until past midnight to shape my dough. So I just folded in the ADY after the autolyse without hydrating. It worked out and the dough was shaped by 1130PM and placed in the fridge 15 minutes later.

Even though the loaf followed the 1 part 100% starter, 2 parts water, 3 parts flour method for sourdough bread, the bread doesn't have a lot of sour at all. The flavor is somewhat light on the tongue, not disagreeably so, but more than I expected considering such a small quantity of ADY.

Starter
120 g at 100% hydration, 80% AP/20% stoneground rye

Main Dough
240 g bread flour
100 g stoneground whole wheat flour
20 g stoneground rye flour   
240 g water at 85F
8 g kosher salt
All of starter
1/8 tsp ADY

The rains have returned for a while with about 2" total over the past week and more expected by tomorrow morning. It could be just my imagination but it seems that there are lot more insects out there right now. The garden plants have new vigor and its good thing because the weeds seem to have the same enthusiasm for growth.

The cucumber in the first picture is a variety that some in the area call an English cucumber. They're long and skinny and not my favorite but acceptable. I do have some of my favorites, Marketmore 76, available now as well. That tomato is a "Whopper Improved", one of three favorite tomatoes.

Today's guest of note on my blog is a viewer from Denmark.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.

Using Leftovers

I did manage to successfully rebuild my starter after two a day refreshments for three days in a row. It's now reasonably vigorous for something kept in a refrigerator. The process did leave me with a lot of discarded starter that I refused to dump down the disposal or put in the compost bin. The thought of wasting 200 g of starter didn't sit well with me so I applied the discard to making some bolilos, a type of Mexican enriched roll.


The process started by building a large quantity of starter to 70%. I then mixed that with an autolysed dough, followed with olive oil, brown sugar, and salt. Not necessarily authentic but good enough for a raggedy home baker. The four rolls were scaled out to around 215 g or so.

The sesame seeds were on the towel I used for proofing but didn't stick very well. I should have just used an egg white wash and sprinkled the seeds. While I got a decent oven spring, the crumb wasn't very open. The flavor was on the sweet side due to the brown sugar but certainly not offensive. I'm just not someone that goes crazy over rolls. I can appreciate the work involved but my tastes lead me elsewhere.They were a good lesson.

Starter
340 g starter at 70% hydration

Main Dough
300 g bread flour
200 g water at 85F
10 g kosher salt
1 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs brown sugar

The other two loaves are a 33% whole wheat and a 30% whole wheat with extra bran added. The dough is behaving differently in this summer heat so my answer for the next loaf is lower hydration and perhaps smaller in size. I haven't found a brotform smaller than the oval shaped one I've been using for quite a while so I may be adding a sheet of bakers linen to my inventory. As some wit from days past once said, "the only difference between man and boys is the cost of their toys". I suspect that she has been proven right many times over.

The most unexpected guest dropping in on my blog recently was from the island of Guernsey along with other guests from Sweden. S. Korea, and Romania.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.

   

A Lazarus Loaf or you can't keep a good starter down

To tell the truth, I thought this loaf was going to be a brick. It had gone through twelve hours of retarded proofing in the fridge, then some eight hours on the counter at a room temp of 80F, and it had not gotten to the top of my brotform. In the first picture, it looks like it was really underproofed. That's what a good oven spring will do. I was fretting that my seed stock starter was on a steep decline so I started what would turn out to be a 72 hour rebuild before the loaf hit the baking stone. The loaf turned out just fine and the starter is also doing well.  I also have plans for the
200 g or so of leftover discard to be used in a batch of dough for bolilos. Doesn't that sound overly ambitious?

Starter
150 g at 100% hydration, 75% AP/ 25% rye flour

Soaker
40 g malted wheat flakes
30 g water
1 Tbs (15 ml) organic honey

Main Dough
300 g bread flour
100 g stoneground whole wheat
280 g water at 90F
11 g kosher salt
All of soaker
All of starter

The drought here continues on with little to no promise of relief. There may be some August monsoon rains that will come up from the Southwest but I'm not planning on them. The tree outside my window has been losing leafs for a while now and there are deep cracks in the hardened ground. My garden doesn't thrive of city water because I won't soak the whole of the garden. I just soak at the bottom of the plants or vines to keep them alive. When you garden for two, you can get away with that.

This past week someone from Bahrain found their way to my blog.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.
     

Rosemary Bread with Biga

The first few pictures today are of the current house loaf. I added a soaker of wheat germ to add a little more flavor and texture to the crumb. I'm beginning to think that my starter is either getting tired and needs to go through a several day refreshment regime to bring back its vitality or that its not reacting well to the change in brand of AP that I'm feeding it. The alternative is to go back and review my procedures to make sure that I'm not the problem. Raggedy home bakers such as myself can't always get by with good intentions or on luck alone.  In any case, the birds outside my window here won't be seeing the crumbs from this one.

Starter
150 G at 75% hydration, AP flour

Soaker
20 g wheat germ
15 g water

Main Dough
280 g bread flour
100 g stone ground whole wheat flour
20 g whole rye flour
11 g kosher salt
280 g water at 90F, plus 15 g water correction during final mix
All of starter
All of soaker

The second loaf is the rosemary bread with biga. I went to work with my wooden bowl again, using some of Ken Forkish's techniques from the book "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast". The techniques are interesting and for the most part effective but I'm not yet able to get the open crumb that I like to brag about. He has an advantage of experience and equipment so I'm not neurotic about my skill level yet. The bread itself needed more minced rosemary than the Tbs I used. However, if I didn't include the rosemary in the ingredients, I could still serve this bread to friends and family without shame. This is a good, uncomplicated bread with a clean flavor that goes well with Italian style pasta dishes.

Biga
80 g AP flour
20 g stone ground whole wheat flour
68 g water at 90F
1/8 tsp active dry yeast

Main Dough
300 g bread flour
200 g water at 90F
1/2 tsp active dry yeast
8 g kosher salt
All of biga
1 Tbs (15 ml) minced fresh rosemary
Olive oil for hands in final mix

We are finally getting fresh tomatoes on all our plants. I am particularly waiting for the San Marzano tomatoes. Once the plant gets going, it produces well until the early blight or frost overtakes it. The plant is supposed to be determinate but since the plant I bought is the "improved" strain, it may not know that as of yet. All the garlic is in, cleaned up, and drying. The softneck garlic is smallish and I'll probably order some new bulbs from Filaree Farms next month. The hard neck garlic isn't bad, not as large as last year, but there's still plenty to save for planting, eating, and giving away. Given the dry weather and forecast of more of the same, all the garlic will be ready for storage early next week. I still have edible garlic from last year so I think I've learned a little about growing that crop.

The sparrows and finches seem to have discovered the suet feeder as of late. They hadn't noticed its existence for quite a while but now are jumping over to the feeder. I haven't seen any hummingbirds in the past few weeks but I'm not sure that we have what they like around the yard. while the monarch butterfly migration will be here in about three weeks, I'm not anxious to leave the milk weed plants in the yard. They don't do much for me or the appearance of the house.

My thanks to the readers that have dropped in to view the blog from Italy, Ireland, Malaysia, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.


     

Mixed Results on a Multi Grain Loaf

I think I let my ambition and imagination get ahead of reality with this loaf. Most of the tricks that I've been playing with lately went into this loaf but I'm not really happy with the outcome. This list of tricks included high hydration, an aerated starter, a soaker, and a longer oven preheat for the baking stone. I'm thinking that a smaller loaf would have gotten more dramatic results. Otherwise, I like the flavor just fine. The next time this comes up in the planning rotation, I hope to keep that memo to myself in the front of my mind.

Starter
150 g at 85% hydration, 75% AP/ 25% whole rye

Soaker
80 g Montana Milling 9 Grain Cereal
80 g water

Main Dough
300 g bread flour
100 g stoneground whole wheat flour
280 g water at 90f
11 g kosher salt
All of Starter
All of Soaker

Good news and bad news on the gardening front today. The bad news is that it appears a deer found its way over to my garden last night and started eating some of my cucumber vines. The damage isn't fatal but Bambi and her kind aren't welcome here. The tomatoes are just starting to ripen and I'd rather not share. The better news is that I've got all my garlic dug up now. The hard neck garlic that I planted last fall turned out as an average size crop. I do have enough big bulbs to plant next season's crop and give some to my brother to see if they'll thrive in Massachusetts conditions. There's also enough to give away to some other local gardeners as samples of what kind of flavor they can expect if they plant their own. One of our flower beds holds a wild garlic bulb of unknown origins that I want to dig up this week. It may be truly wild and it may be the result of something that I did years ago. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Comments, humor, and questions are welcome.