fredsbread's blog

About a decade ago, when I first read online about trying to make Neapolitan-style pizza at home, the consensus seemed to be that it took about 7 minutes to bake a pizza at 550°F. Obviously, that's a lot longer than the 90 seconds typical for true Neapolitan pizza, so you compensate as much as possible with dough hydration to keep it from getting too crispy.

I recently picked up Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking, in which Hart describes a very simple shaping method for his "City Loaf". Basically, after pre-shaping into a round and resting, he folds it in half like a taco and places it in the banneton. According to him, there's no difference in oven spring or ear formation vs the convoluted stitching and rolling method he learned at Tartine. I decided to give it a shot, so I doubled my normal recipe to do a side-by-side comparison.

I wish there was a way for me to practice making panettone more than the one time a year that I bring it to my parents' house to share with the whole family. I used the Roy recipe again, since it worked so well before and I didn't want to risk ruining my one batch. Luckily, this year they turned out well enough that my wife wants me to make more for her later. At least, that's what she says now; pregnancy makes her tastes change quite quickly.

My wife wanted these sausage and pepper sandwiches for dinners this week, so I made a batch of "Italian bread" as sandwich rolls from Bread Baker's Apprentice. The only deviations I made from the recipe were to let the biga retard in the fridge for about 36 hours, and to retard the proof again for about 9 hours while I was at work.

Last Christmas my wife bought me some wheat berries from Barton Springs Mill. Unfortunately, she started a major allergen elimination diet not long after that because we thought our newborn was sensitive to something she was eating. That turned out not to be the case, and we're all back to eating everything we want, so I was finally able to compare the two hard red wheats that she got me (Yecora Rojo and Rouge de Bordeaux) to the regular hard red wheat I get from the LDS Home Storage Center.

For today's bake, I decided to take a page from Benito's book and make a whole wheat sourdough with 2% vital wheat gluten and a bran scald. I used freshly milled hard red wheat and sifted it with a 50 mesh sieve.

Scald:

• 141g bran (13.8%)
• 282g boiling water (27.6%)

Main dough

I made three panettoni for my family Christmas, and I'm very happy with the result. There was some discrepancy between final proofing temperatures due to proximity to the oven light, so one of them was a little shorter than it could have been, but the flavor and texture was great on all of them.

I always have so many different types of bread I'd like to bake, but I can only eat so much in any given week. One style of bread I've been wanting to try for a few months is a miche, and now that I've gotten a handle on making my own 85% extraction flour, I decided now was the time to jump on it.

My wife and I took our newborn daughter home from the hospital on Saturday and we didn't have any fresh bread to eat, so I refreshed my starter and got baking Sunday. I'd seen the discussion for the community bake and wanted to participate, but my options for non-wheat were corn meal or grinding oats or rice. I chose to go with the corn meal and cooked it like a porridge. I also used soaked oats as the 10% seed portion, though in hindsight I probably should've mixed them into the "polenta" after it was done cooking to avoid adding more water, as the dough was extremely wet.

When my wife and I went to Italy earlier this year, we had a pizza in Bergamo that became my wife's favorite combination of toppings: red onion and bacon. I was itching to make some pizza, and my wife said I could make it any time as long as it had onion and bacon.