This recipe creates a lovely moist and flavoursome sourdough bread made from potatoes.
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Potato Sourdough
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Kneading Techniques
Kneading is all about modifying the flour protein to impart flexibility with enough strength to trap, yeast and bacteria generated, CO2 gas. It’s important that the protein network in the dough remain in tact so the gas doesn’t escape like a deflating balloon.
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Stoneground Sourdough
This recipe uses 60% stoneground flour and 40% bakers flour. Stoneground flour is created by grounding the whole wheat grain using a stone mill. The process is slower and prevents the grain from being exposed to high temperatures allowing more of the nutrients to be retained. The endosperm, bran and germ are in their natural, original proportions, allowing for higher and efficient nutrient absorption.
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Ciabatta for a Lovely Lunch Treat
We were inspired by this post from The Perfect Loaf to try making a sourdough ciabatta for some special friends, who used to own a cafe and are very particular about their food.
The first thing we realised about ciabatta is that it really should be eaten the same day that it is baked. Because of the high hydration it does become a bit “chewy” the next day. However having said that it is magnificent when eaten after it has cooled from coming out of the oven.
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Fig Apricot Raisin and Walnut Sourdough
A lovely way to start your day with a sourdough packed to bursting with fruity flavour. The figs, apricots and raisins combine beautifully with the walnuts to create a delicious sourdough bread.
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Gluten Free Bread by Robin Ellenberger
Learn the secret to making gluten free bread in your own home from our guest expert, Robin Ellenberger.
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Panettone
If there’s one iconic festive sourdough product that has captured the imagination of bakers worldwide, its got to be panettone! A delight to eat for its flavour, aroma and its typically highly aerated texture. Coming up to Christmas its a fitting baking challenge that if done correctly is very rewarding.
The quest of making a really good panettone ‘artisan’ style – without the emulsifies, preservatives and bottled aroma concoctions – has been gaining ground in internet baking circles for good reason. It’s a challenge for bakers and chefs all over the world.
We recently received some feedback from a Bread Boss user who expressed dismay at the plethora of sourdough terms used all around the English speaking world. This included books, videos and websites. It’s all very confusing and makes it hard to understand. Bread Boss seemed like just another one to add to the pile of mishmash. It occurred to us this may be a timely post and others may also find this interesting and informative.
The author of the email kindly allowed me to reproduce the relevant part as the basis of this post. Here’s an excerpt from the email.
“In all the books and in all the serious online websites there is a complete range of names used for the various stages of bread baking. Some are reasonably consistent like ferment and proof but in sourdough there are a full range of names for the same thing. For instance Peter Rienhart calls his starter a mother and uses some of it to create a “stiff dough”. Dan Leader calls it a liquid Levain, to make a stiff dough. You guys call it a starter to make a “sourdough”. I know we can’t change the world but maybe recognising these wide variations of terminology in your app might help other beginning bakers. As for me the whole sourdough nomenclature was confusing.”
My reply isn’t meant to be an exhaustive recount but a brief outline of the history of the problem and why Bread Boss and this site uses the sourdough terms it does.
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Sourdough Pizza for Easter
This Easter happened to coincide with my birthday and Karen, Boris and I took our families to stay at a farm house for a little R&R. We stayed at the comfortable Billabong Cottage in Norway near Oberon on the western side of the Blue Mountains, about 3 hours from Sydney (Australia:). We decided to make the trip a bread holiday – not sure if that’s a thing, but it probably should be!
Karen was keen to perfect a fruit bread we have been working on. Boris wanted to perfect our freshly milled flour recipe and I … I just wanted sleep. As luck would have it I had to stay awake and work on the sourdough pizza. Oh, and we also decided to make a freshly milled sourdough rye – just to mix it up a bit.
It was that time of year again when baking students at the Sydney TAFE Ultimo were recognised for their hard work and achievements on completion of the Retail Baking Bread, Retail Baking Combined and Patisserie Certificate III Courses.
Each year the graduation ceremony for baking students is held in the Apprentice Restaurant at the Ultimo campus on Harris Street. At the same ceremony, students with outstanding achievements are also recognised. There was an array of people present that night which included the students’ families, friends and employers. Industry representatives also graced the occasion marking the significance of the event.
It’s a good question that most people seem to have an opinion on. Opinions by trendy foodies, celebrities, as well as us mere mortals all over the world are mainly focusing on the ills of gluten. The gluten free market is now a huge market, so now there are vested interests involved, much the same as there were on the opposite side.
It seems that further investigation and blind testing has been finding that it’s more complicated than we thought. It seems there could be another culprit which has not been in the public consciousness.
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BreadBoss App as a Development Tool
Chef/bakers have found Bread Boss® a tool to manage, create and vary their formulas and recipes and also to manage the schedule alarm features.
What may not be immediately apparent to the new or prospective user is that Bread Boss® is an ideal tool for development of new products and refining existing formulas that are still a work in progress.
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Tasmania Again..
It seems I can’t keep away from the “apple Isle” for too long. Trout, cane rods and baking beckon….
It was that time of year when some of us cane rod makers get together at Peter Hayes’ on Brumby’s Creek at Cressy for the Cane Rod Makers weekend. But I had decided to combine it with a research tour to see Gareth Shapiro of the “The Grain Family of Tasmania” fame in Moltema TAS.
But that wasn’t all… Having had the good fortune to have met not only Gareth among others at grAiNZ 2017, but also, Ian Lowe as well as Nick Boskell and Ian Pope of Apiece bakery in Launceston. In fact when I heard these blokes were not far from Cressy I rubbed my hands together and under my breath said to myself…. “you beauty!” I won’t be making bread at the Cane rod gathering this year. So I ordered baguettes and croissants from the clever bakers at Apiece.
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grAiNZ 2017 Bread Ed
Melbourne 2014 was the start of an event that has been an annual feature of a small group of craft bakers, millers and increasingly growers. It’s affectionately dubbed “grAiNZ”. This week “grAiNZ 2017” or “Bread Ed 2017” was hosted at Dust Bakery in Sydney.
The first time I visited Dust Cesare Salemi mentioned that a gathering of like minded bakers and millers will be getting together this year in Sydney. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as I’ve not been to this “Bread Ed” before, at least not a baking one of this ilk.
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Every home has a proving cabinet
Where I’m living, winter is fast approaching and the annual problem of dough proving at home is rearing up again. It doesn’t get too cold in Sydney in winter (compared to Europe or North America), but because of that very fact most of us don’t have central heating. The house can easily get down to between 5 – 10°C (41 – 50°F) overnight and 12 – 16°C (54 – 61°F) through the day, which is a little cool for bulk fermentation unless I extended the times beyond my schedule. Most of my bread dough has a DTO (Dough To Oven time) of around 24 hours. So in these cool environments my timings are thrown out. Of course, I could reschedule to extend the time frames but I really want it to fit my current times.
Recently, it finally dawned on me: “why in gods name am I not using my kitchen oven!”
So, with the last couple of batches of bread, I used the oven for proving the sourdough overnight and for the final proof the next day. The results were fantastic and most importantly – predictable!
A few weeks ago I was invited with a long time colleague, Laurie Donnelly, to coffee by a mutual colleague and friend, Jessica Pedemont the chocolatier, for a very interesting discussion with baker Cesare Salemi of “Dust” Café & Bakery at the Glebe Tramsheds. Cesare brought out some of his bread made from freshly milled stoneground. Cesare grinds his own flour through a stone mill in his bakery. We were duly impressed by the depth of flavour and aroma of his bread. Cesare calls it “living nutrition” and urged me to try it. I was keen to discover more.
So I contacted the company with an excellent reputation, Skippy Grain Mills. I wanted to try it for myself and show stone milling wheat at home. Home milling wheat with a stone mill then baking the bread using that fresh stoneground on the same day of milling is very doable at home. I wondered if I could significantly capture more of the flavour and aroma of the Lancer wheat variety in bread baked with freshly stone milled Lancer grain.
I recently got some feedback from a Bread Boss user asking how to add an autolyse to their recipe. I thought this was a great opportunity to write a post on how to do that for all the Bread Boss users. I started writing up instructions with lots of screen shots, when it dawned on me: this would be much better as a video recording using the app. So that’s what I’ve done. Hopefully the quality is not too bad and you can get what you need from it (click the video to start playing):
Having different flour samples to test bake is always an interesting exercise. From season to season flour can be very different. Anyone who has baked for several seasons will know that from experience. Commercial bread flours have significant homogeneity as millers are usually blending grain grown in differing geographical areas of different varieties or from different seasons with different characteristics. The rationale is to remove the peaks and troughs in what is perceived as baking “quality”.
A quiet revolution is building as some consumers and bakers are beginning to appreciate bread as a food in its own right rather than a cheap “bulking” or “filling” food. Bread can have a variety of flavours and complexities not unlike other fermented foods such as cheese. A good analogy is the variety and complexity of wines and single malt whiskeys.
Recently a Bread Boss user contacted us with concern that they didn’t understand how their formula can be accommodated within Bread Boss. It seemed every time they tried to enter the formula, warnings were flagged in Bread Boss. Incidentally, warnings are built into the app as Bread Boss has a specific method of calculating ingredients using underlying principles. Of course these warnings can be ignored but it’s good to have the warning in case something is overlooked. More on that later.
It eventually came to light that although the user used percentages in his formula it was inconsistent with the “bakers percentage” method. This got me thinking about the most common methods used in baking to express formulas.
The Tale of Two Cities
As far as I can tell it appears there are two main methods, but not limited to these two, prevailing in the world of baking. For want of accurate designations I call them:
- European method (although by no means all European bakers use it)
- American method (again by no means all)
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Christmas Stollen
Learn how to make Stollen, a traditional German Christmas Bread. This is our first recipe that is not sourdough as it is a sweet bread and is normally made using yeast. This recipe makes 6 Stollen and they can be kept for a week or frozen and then brought out on Christmas Day.
Good bread is born of controlling the key factors that influence bread quality. These are physical processes through micro-organism activity. After all, micro-organisms do all the work converting ‘grain into bread’!
Temperature is one of those key factors that bakers need to consider and use to influence the condition of their sourdoughs and bread doughs. As micro-organisms are highly dependent on their environment we want to get as close to giving them the best conditions as possible for them, our schedules and not least of all bread flavour and quality! The rate of bacterial and yeast multiplication, metabolic activity and enzyme activity is dramatically influenced by temperature. So we need to get it as close to optimum as we can.
Earlier I wrote up about the Major Factor (MF) method for calculating the water temperature for bread dough making. In this post I’d like to cover the “Base Temperature” (BT) method of calculating dough water temperature. So why another method? The reason is that the Base Temperature method has more accuracy when using pre-ferments, sourdoughs or quantities of other ingredients with varying temperatures, such as refrigerated ingredients.
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Back to School
Last Saturday Karen, Tim and I went to the Sydney TAFE (Technical and Further Education) College to join the Artisan Bread Making course, with Boris as the Teacher. This was a simple one day course designed to introduce students to sourdough bread making. My main motivation for going was to see how Boris teaches in a formal setting and to see some larger scale machinery for bread making (I’ve always had a fantasy to own a serious dough mixer like a Hobart).
Being an IT professional, where most of your work is done sitting on your ass, it was quite an eye opener to see how hard it is working in a commercial bakery, much less teaching a herd of deer how to make sourdough bread.
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Open Sesame!
Did a great variation on our classic mixed grain: inverted the bulk/retardation ferments and added a coating of sesame seeds.
Boris was over at my place a few weeks back and commented on my mixed grain bread just out of the oven. I was all pleased and proud to show off, but… “Looks good mate, but its a bit dense.” What I thought was a fine crumb turned out to be crummy. The good thing about Boris is that he’s not just an armchair critic: he’s an expert that offers solutions for every problem he diagnoses.
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Sourdough Pancakes
Cycling your starter during long breaks between bread baking can lead to excess starter if its not used in some way. Some people like to give some away to friends, but others like to put it to other good uses.
As one of our Bread Boss testers said he would rather make pancakes than discard a portion of his starter when not making bread. Great idea!!
Enjoy these delicious sourdough pancakes with fresh cream, blueberries, raspberries, bananas and maple syrup.
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Sourdough Baguettes
Learn how to make these crusty, mouth-watering sourdough baguettes.
Their complex flavour and beautiful taste come from the long fermentation and retardation time (time in the fridge), 100% hydration of the sourdough and a little bit of stoneground and fava bean flour.
These baguettes are quite small so that they fit into the domestic oven but they are delicious. Best eaten fresh from the oven. One of the flours in the recipe is fava bean flour but we ended up using fava and garbanzo flour as this was the only one available in our local health-food store.
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The Bakers Percentage
Making bread isn’t the same as cooking, bread making is a straight forward process but it involves a combination of biochemical and physical processes by living organisms. This means it’s important to have a balanced formula as microorganisms are very sensitive to changes to their environment – in this case – bread dough. It also means ingredients at the right weights. I use the word “formula” for good reason. Most uninitiated in bread baking believe that the word ‘formula’ and ‘recipe’ are really the same. This is not the case in bread baking. There’s a subtle but important difference.
A question I get asked a lot by home Bakers and consumers is, what is the best way to store bread during the time it is to be eaten?
Many suggest the fridge but I tell people that the fridge is a bad choice. Some look at me like I’m from another planet. There’s a good reason for not using the fridge.
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2 Seeded 2 Grain Rye
Learn how to make this gorgeous rye sourdough bread with a complex flavour, aroma and moist crumb. Very popular as the grain flavours are very apparent in this bread.
This recipe uses 25% rye flour (only the endosperm of the rye berry) and 20% rye meal (the entire rye berry) and only 20% bakers flour. The soaker includes kibbled or cracked wheat, kibbled rye, sunflower kernels and linseeds.
Rye flour is a good one to try if you have issues with bloating as it includes only small amounts of gluten.
If you’ve looked at any quality bread recipes or books you may have noticed that dough temperature is nearly always included.
An often asked question is whether it really matters. Do we really need to bother with temperature? Is it just for professional bakers or those pedantic and fanatic personality types? I’m sure those personality types would revel in those details, but that doesn’t necessarily mean bread dough temperature is not important. So how important is it for the home baker? To answer that question we should examine the role temperature plays in influencing fermentation and bread quality. Lets start with some fundamentals and elaborate from there.