tpassin's blog

After seeing Renee's and Lin's achievements with crumble bigas, I wanted to try them again. I was especially interested in the one that used both a biga and a poolish, between them including all the flour.

These biscuits (UK: more-or-less "scones") use 50% whole wheat pastry flour, 50% AP flour with melted butter, sour cream, milk, baking powder, a tad of baking soda, salt, and sugar. I used the baking soda to get a little more lift because it would react with the acidity in the sour cream. I made a small batch, using only 125g (1 cup) of flour. I winged the recipe as I went.

This loaf used 20% rye, 15% spelt, and 75% bread flour along with an oatmeal porridge containing 20% of the total flours of Scottish oatmeal along with the bran sifted from the rye and spelt. To top it all off I added 60g of "Trinity": 20g each of EEVO, honey, and yogurt.

The rye and spelt flours were stone ground, sifted with a #30 screen.

... Hours, that is. Today I made a Pullman loaf start to finish, in an hour and a half. And it's pretty decent, too.

I decided to try my hand at baking a bread in such a short time after I'd watched one too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show, known as the Bakeoff in the UK.  Over and over again the baker contestants had to create various kinds of bread in ridiculously short times, usually 2 hours or less. Up until now, I had always thought that a bread completed in short times would have little flavor and a limp crumb.

Continuing with the twin themes of Cream Of Wheat and Pullman loaves, here is a yeasted Pullman loaf made with a yudane that used Cream Of Wheat for the flour. I included the COW in the total flour weight for baker's percentage calculations.

Recipe
---------
- 450g - flour
   -  90g - (20%) - Cream of Wheat (Yudane)
   - 360g - AP

Following up on our recent speculations about using Cream of Wheat, I made a loaf with 50% COW. It worked out very well, though there was an unplanned extra 4 1/2-day bulk fermentation in the fridge (it was supposed to be only overnight).

I didn't know how well the COW would absorb water, but I suspected that it would take longer than usual. I started with 62% hydration. I would use a little less next time since the dough ended up a little sticky and didn't want to hold its shape quite well enough. Still, a good result.

You know that bubbly, lacy appearance when you look at a well-fermented starter through the side of its container? I've often wondered if that structure could be captured by baking it, and what the result would taste like. Now that I've got my new 4 X 4 X 4 Pullman pan (excuse me, "toast box"), I decided to try it out.

Recently there was a TFL thread that linked back to txfarmer's post from long ago in pain-de-mie, or slightly enriched soft shreadable sandwich loaves. Here's the link:

https://weightloss-slim.fit/node/20669/sourdough-pan-de-mie-how-make-quotshreddablyquot-soft-bread%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E

I created a new starter using masa hariña in four days.  This loaf is the first bake using it.

I don't know that there's much benefit out of using an all- masa hariña starter but I wanted to see if it would leaven a wheat bread well enough, as I thought it would. It seemed possible that there might be some interesting flavors compared with a wheat starter.

These rye cakes use rye starter discard and are taken right from this page:

https://www.beetsandbones.com/russian-whole-grain-rye-cakes-korzhiki/

My try at reproducing them came out almost exactly like them (I made a half recipe, or 4 cakes). I did increase the baking powder by about 50%, which is intermediate between what I would use for scones (UK)/biscuits (US) and the recipe. Mine seem to have risen more, and maybe that was the reason.