tattooedtonka's blog

I started my day off making french bread from some yeast pre-ferments from last night. 

After mixing, folding and so on, I figured I am not going to try anything fancy I just want rustic looking bread (ugly bread that is). 

And I am happy with the results of my ugly breads.

We had this loaf for dinner and it was quite good. 

I also made a couple loaves of country bread

Both the french bread and country bread recipes are from Hamelmans "Bread"

And they are both very good in my opinion.

TT

Well after making about a couple dozen bagels a week for the last 3 or 4 weeks, I figured I would try Cinn./Raisin Bagels as well as regulars.

I soon found out Cinn./Raisin Bagels are not like making regular bagels.  The shaping really kicked my butt.  Plenty of lumps, bumps, seams, oh what a mess.  I have been making my bagels in 4.5oz. size.  But with raisins I went with a 5oz. weight.  After shaping I was really concerned they would end up looking like bumpy biscuits, but I was happy with the ending results.  Most of the lumps smoothed out in the baking process.

After reading Tigressbakes Cornbread post I decided to give it a go.  She is right in her post, it makes alot of cornbread.  But it is a very good recipe.  I took a shot of the outside and then later took some of the inside, but those photos didnt turn out so well.  Here is what I did have.

After trying this out I decided to give Sourdough Guys "Sunflower Seed Bread" an attempt.   Since I am still wrestlin with my starter I decided to try to adapt it to a White/Wheat bread with a white poolish.  I used his weight ratios for the seeds.  He warned that he didnt go 100% with them, so I figured what the heck, I'll try.  So with that I took the entire added up weight of all flours used in the recipe and matched it with exactly the same amount of roasted seeds (per his spec.).  WOW was that alot.  It was a bit messy, and a whole lotta fun.  I used Mike Averys folding method that I read about thanks to JMonkeys recent post, and here are my results.  ALOT of seeds.......Tastes pretty good though if you dont mind so much crunch in your bread.

Well thats all for now...

TT

Well after reading some posts on here comparing different books recipes on a given bread, I gave one a test.

I have been using BBA's recipe for Poolish Ciabatta, with wonderful results in outward appearance.  The crumb was not as open as I hoped though.

So today I made two Ciabatta w/ Olive Oil from Hamelmans "Bread" book.  The dough was much wetter than I had expected.  And all the recipes in the book print times for mixing with a stand mixer, but not if you are doing it by hand.  So I tried to make an educated guess.  The crumb is o.k. and I have much larger holes in the crumb than I did with BBA's, but I believe I underbaked a little.  I didnt use an internal temp probe to monitor temp, I thought it wouldnt be very accurate with all the large holes I knew this would make.  So I tried to go as long as I could without completely blackening the crust.  Here is what I got.

The flavor of these is much different than BBA's as well.  And I realize there would be some difference due to the Olive Oil being added, but there is a big difference to me.   It tastes good, so I wont complain to much, I just have to work on the times better in the future.

While I was at it I made two loaves of Hamelmans Pain Rustique.  These came out great.  The guesswork I did on mixing times on this worked out well.  I am very pleased with the feel of the crust, and the holes in the crumb.  Here they are.

TT

I am doing this after seeing so many create a blog of their efforts.  Hopefully I will be able to look back on this over the next years and see some sort of improvement, hopefully.  Ha, ha

April 1st bread