July 13, 2023 - 9:47am
Resurfacing after slipping down a rabbit hole for a spell
The past three months were non-bake months due to travel. Coming home I had to refresh my 100% AP levain and did so from my healthy 75% hydration mixed flour levain. 3 or 4 builds within 24 hours was all it took to have a hearty levain to work with.
All posted by me before, and I pondered whether to even post these, but what the heck. Here's what came out of my oven between Sunday and Wednesday.
Somewhat Deli Rye w/caraway - way easier than a true deli rye and just as tasty.
750g x 2 batards.
Hamelman Vermont SD.
400g x 3 long batards
Hamelman WW SD.
330g x 3 long batards
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Welcome back. You haven't lost your touch Cheers.
from repetitive motion does pay dividends after all. Kinda like riding a bicycle.
thanks, Alan
Very Nice Alan welcome back and very nice breads right there, You must have some good stories and pictures of your travels to show, im sure bread on your travels must have cropped up!
kind regard Derek
1. We were in Spain and the general quality of bread served at our table/counter as well as from several bakeries exceeded expectations, a pleasant surprise.
2. I was finally able to come across the tritordeum flour I brought home several years ago from Barcelona, after first reading about it from TFL's Abel Sierra. A European hybrid of semolina and barley, it is still in limited distribution. Not one of the several bulk bin stores we stopped into in Valencia or Madrid last year had even heard of it. We found it exactly where we first looked the previous visit to Barcelona. Limited by what we could carry home, I settled on two 1k bags. I've posted several tritordeum bakes on TFL in the past, three are listed below. So I'm really looking forward to baking with this hard to find grain again.
3. At closing time I had a discussion with our local pizza shop owner/pizzaiolo in Madrid who will be heading near our way in September. He was eager to learn how to add levain baguettes to his repertoire. If the stars are aligned, he and his wife will join us for a day of an elbow to elbow baking lesson/session here, something I've now done a few times before, as recently as earlier this year with a cousin.
Our daily breakfast stop at Forn Baltá*, where I found the tritordeum, on C. de Sants in Barcelona.
* the name of the bakery had to be changed to Horno Baltâ during the dictatorship of Franco, as he basically outlawed the Catalan language. Both forn and horno translate as oven. The Catalan language is alive and well and prominent everywhere in Catalonia, some businesses have signage for both Catalan and Castellano, many only in Catalan.
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/61193/tritordeum-ciabatta-experiments
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/60723/weekend-bakery-semolina-and-sesame-
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/63082/had-get-ziggy-right
Sounds like you had a great trip. Look forward to seeing some new bakes with that special flour. As usual your baking has your signature Alfonso look 😃
the Vermont SD formula and my long-term comfort with the dough just about never fails to give similar results. Pretty much the same with the deli rye too.
As this point, well into retirement and comfortable with months-long abandonment of the homestead, we never consider these types of trips as vacations, the term that you wisely avoided writing 🙄.
The tritordeum is so similar to semolina in character and handling that there should/will be no problems getting my greasy little fingers back into it again.
Your relatively new meme reminds me, as if I needed it, that a fair amount of time spent on the streets in Spain (and really anywhere) revolves around ogling dogs. We came across a breed there that has quite similar characteristics to our dearly departed puppy. The breed is Podenco, one which I'd never heard of before. On weekends in high traffic pedestrian zones, rescue associations set up adoption sites, and we melted when we saw one and pondered whether we could punch holes on our suitcase and slip one home with us 🤓. https://www.thesprucepets.com/podenco-dog-full-profile-history-and-care-4693495 .
Thanks for the encouragement!
Alan
What a beautiful breed. I know how hard it is to resist! My youngest of 4 Gracie is sitting in my lap swatting my hand every time I try to type and stop petting her 😉. Never a dull moment with 4 pups and 3 😸!
Our pup was, according to the shelter, a cross between a basenji and lab. We never saw the lab part, but her fighting weight was basically twice a normal basenji's so there was something else going on in there. Maybe as far as dogs go, it isn't a good thing to try and reinvent the wheel on the second dance around, but we were so attracted to that podenco as well as when we first went back to our apartment in Madrid and started to look the breed up.
Welcome back. :)
I've stated several times that if I don't have anything new or an improvement to something already on my baking wheel of fortune, I don't post it - with exceptions like this "rule-breaker". But it feels good the get the dough in my hands and create something.
Once you learn, you never forget. The baguettes are perfect!
It has always amazed me how super difficult task become simple and easy, ONCE YOU LEARN…
Danny
Several times I've mentioned that "the first 10,000 are the hardest, after that it gets easy". But we never want to be so full of ourselves that we slip and get sloppy, because dough has a way of coming back and biting us (instead of the other way around!). Humility goes a long way around these parts.
Alan
Glad to see your post. It brought me out of lurking mode as well. You and your starter look happily reunited again and making up well for the lost time. Muscle memory is a valuable asset for bread making.
I have not been posting anything lately either but I haven’t been anywhere. I am still bread baking as always but with more emphasis on pizza. I have written some posts but didn’t click save because it wasn’t worth saying or I sounded like the curmudgeon that I am, some fish bum not fit for polite society. Have your ears gotten bigger with the time spent down in the rabbit hole? Nice to see The Baguette Brigade falling into formation
Don
fairly scarce around this neighborhood for quite a while now. I suppose it was time to let the newer crew come in and more or less take over, just as we kinda did a number of years ago now.
My ears may have grown a tad but they are no match for Ross Perot and his Presidential Debate statement of "I'm all ears".
Thanks, Alan
I was referring to the ears on your batards. Your most recent ones are some of your best ever.
I suppose we are doing the noble thing by stepping back to allow more room for others to flourish or stumble around like we did.
My favorite Ross Perot moment is when he said, “Now you see it’s like this. We are in a plane that is going down, it’s going to crash into the ground and you people are complaining about the sandwiches that are being served.” That had more meaning back then when they still served food on flights and there was enough room to eat something in front of you.
Great looking bakes Alan. Nice to see you back posting your bakes. It sounds like you guys enjoyed your trip.
As others have pointed out you haven’t lost your touch and your breads all have that certain Alfanso style to them. I can almost taste them from here.
I have to say that your starter that you gave me is alive and well here in Toronto and I’m using it more than my original starter for my bakes now.
Benny
and only starter from scratch - Ms. Wink's Pineapple Juice Solution, back sometime the better part of 10 years ago now. It has seen several different branches of service, anywhere from a 60% rye to a 125% AP and several stops in between. And it had been distributed to several states before as well. So I'm glad you are on board too.
Versus folks like you, Ian and host of others, I have a fairly narrow range of what I'm interested in baking, and really I don't need more than that for stimulation. But I do want to get back to another tritordeum ciabatta bake.
Thanks, Alan