Category: Ingredients

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Bread Education Ingredients Recipes

Fresh Stoneground Milling at Home

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.

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Ingredients

Initial Bake Test Lancer and Spitfire Flour

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”.

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Ingredients

Australian Flour – from Commodity to Single Origin

Provenance Flour

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.

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Bread Education Ingredients

Malt Flour for sourdough – Diastatic or Non- Diastatic…

There is much confusion over malt – not ‘single malt’ – but malt added to bread dough. The two main classifications of malt are, ‘diastatic’ and ‘non-diastatic’.

Many a home baker is suspicious of “diastatic” malt flour until they learn exactly what it is…. I’m just guessing, but I think it’s because the word  ‘diastatic’ sounds a bit like an ‘additive’. Fear not…. it’s simply grain – wheat or barley – that has been sprouted. Yes, that’s right!

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Ingredients Recipes

Project Semolina: A less Sour Sourdough

Image of hand mixing semolina project dough with ring on. Always remember to remove your jewelry.
Mixing semolina project dough with ring on. Always remember to remove your jewelry.

One of the first questions posted on our site was asking for a way to keep the good properties of naturally leavened sourdough while minimizing the actual sour taste. I have to admit that I’ve often come across people new to the sourdough experience complaining that the bread is too sour. I suspect that the white poison (sugar) permeated throughout our food industry has altered peoples sense of taste, creating a baseline far from that of our not too distant past, when all bread was ‘sourdough’. I decided that this would be a perfect home baking experiment: Project Semolina.

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