It’s been a few months since my last batch of kouign amann and co-workers had been missing them (a good thing for sure). In order to get a more caramelized crust, I baked on the middle lower rack for 15 minutes and upper middle for 10 at 375 degrees F.
200g of leaven needed to be used and Elissa liked morning buns – a Wisconsin treat that has found a second home in San Francisco. There is something magical about laminated pastries. Probably the butter.
The sweet bread recipe from Reinhart’s “artisan bread every day” book combined with my lazy lamination technique resulted in these morning buns. More practice is required to get shaping correct, malady but it’s not like I’m going throw these out.
I’ve been maintaining a 2x daily feed starter for my weekend bakes, online and thought that I should mix it up a little bit. Instead of throwing away the 200g (reserving 50g for 1:2:2 starter:water:flour feed), I was going to use it as the leaven for my baking. This meant two bakes a day or at least two preps a day.
The country loaf from the Tartine Bread book calls for 200g leaven so it was quite convenient to bake two 1000g boules. To shorten the time, I skipped the autolyses by adding salt and additional water from the beginning and then augmented with 4g of instant yeast. Blasphemy, I know!
These loaves were actually 10% whole wheat and 5% rye, 85% AP. The loaves were cooked in a Lodge Combo Cooker, covered for 20 minutes and uncovered for 25.
Still playing with the espresso powered steam injection, buy I made a batch of SFBI sourdoughs to compare against the oem drip pan system. While rise was generous, page it wasn’t enough to produce a pronounced ear. Two of the six loaves had ears, the other four simply spreading. It could be that the steam lowered the oven temperature too much, and thus reducing the full rising capabilities of the bread.
