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• 200g starter
• 100g high protein flour
• 10g water
• 5g malt syrup
• 5g wheat gluten
• 4g salt

Feedback: more malt and more chew needed. 

We love English muffins, but we dislike waking up early in the morning to make muffins from scratch.   Cook’s Illustrated’s Baking Illustrated booklet has a recipe for English muffin bread that looked easily adaptable to overnight rise and a quick morning bake in the toaster oven.

Since I have a sourdough starter that I feed daily, finding recipes to bake everyday is desirable.   If it’s not baked, the discard would go in the trash.

Stuff

• 200 g starter, 100% hydration
• 300 g bread flour
• 260 g milk
• 8 g salt
• 8 g sugar
• 4 g baking soda
• Cornmeal for the bottom of the loaf pan

Procedure

1. Mix all the above except cornmeal
2. Stretch and fold x 4
3. Rest 30 minutes, stretch and fold x 4
4. Pour into a loaf pan that has cornmeal dusted on the bottom. 
5. Cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator.
6. Next morning, preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
7. Score the dough. 
8. Bake for 40-45 minutes to 200 degrees F internal temperature. 
9. Remove from pan and cool to room temperature.  

If you don’t score, the rise is uncontrolled. 

70% hydration sourdough baguettes with cold bulk fermentation overnight in the refrigerator.

Strong oven spring showed weakness in my shaping.

With Google Express delivering barley malt from Whole Foods yesterday, information pills bagel tests continue.   While this batch is slightly over baked at 22 min and 400 degrees F, progress is being made.

Formula is 55% hydration, 5% barley malt, 2% salt and 1.25% instant yeast.  Cold ferment for bulk overnight in the refrigerator.  One hour final proof, boil in baked baking soda water solution for 30 seconds each side, and in the oven.

Post boil:

Post final proof:

Gasp!  Bread that’s not gorgeous?!?  What am I posting?  How can I show people that I am an amazing/perfect baker?!?

Life is about recovery and learning from failure.

This bake just got away from me.  A 75% hydration is fraught with potential failure points, and I hit them pretty well.  The final proof was too long (was distracted with a more pressing activity) and then the dough stuck to the couche.

The crumb is at least decent.

Tomorrow will be better.

Been attempting an original recipe for Vietnamese baguettes.  One of the “Perfect Sourdough” FB members shared a high hydration high protein recipe and I converted it to sourdough and used 5% brown rice flour to hopefully yield a crisper crust. 

The member also noted that she did not have a baking stone, but baked on an aluminum sheet pan.  I did a comparison bake for her, keeping everything thing else constant. 

With a higher thermal mass and better heat transfer, the baking stone produced an almost 50% increase in volume and a more open crumb structure. 

With the refrigerator retarding the dough, weeknight baking is pretty easy. While these weeknight loaves aren’t super impressive, they do satisfy the baking itch. And as raisin pecan sourdoughs, they are pretty decent. These are 25% raisins, 15% pecan, and 5% whole wheat.

After spending some time with the Haussler, it was back to the combo cooker for sourdough bread baking.

Here are some batards.

And the cross section. Slightly overproofed, though it didn’t feel that way with the finger/pressure test. Guess I’m not as good as I think I am 🙂

Sometimes baking bread over the weekend simply isn’t enough. While my week night sourdoughs don’t have the same panache as the weekend loaves, they are still satisfying to bake and eat.

The week night boule also highlighted that my bread knife needed sharpening. Its cutting ability can only be called “tearing.”

The Haussler bread oven, food as mighty as it is, troche had been recently relegated to pizza parties. And to be honest, it only makes so so pizza (or more likely, I can only make so so pizza in it). This weekend, I decided to use the oven for what it’s good at – baking bread.

After last bake’s too quick browning, I decided to lower the temperature to the recommended manufacturer setting for the top – 290 deg. Celsius. For bottom, I raised to 200 deg Celsius from the recommended 190. This would promote the proper bottom browning of my bread as the recommended temp left them pail.

With 4kg of dough, I made a combination of large boules, small boules, and batards. The breads are too blond, but they had been baking for over 30 minutes so I thought to take them out.

Here’s the family picture. For my non-baguettes, still finding it difficult to produce pronounced ears. My shaping technique isn’t different from when baking with a Lodge Combo Cooker, so my issue is managing the oven to produce the same results.