It’s again time for a bread recipe for the blog. The last weeks I played with two different methods: Cold Autolyze like Phillipe Gosselin used and the 3/4 Sponge I found in a recipe of Dan Lepard (scroll down for the recipe).
The recipe for the bread with 3/4 Sponge use only a minimal amount of yeast which is completely added to the sponge, something that always fascinate me.
MC posted last week the portrait of the Baker John Tredgold , one of nine Bakers of the Bread Bakers Guild Team USA 2010. They train at the moment for the North American Louis Lesaffre Cup which takes place in Las Vegas in September.
And he gave MC the recipe of the bread that won him a spot in the Team, including a excelsheet with the formula in Bakers percent. The bread sounds great (of course it do. It is a winner recipe). It contains three different preferments: Poolish, biga and sourdough. I love breads with different preferments because they give so much flavour to the bread. So I knew instantly that I had to try this recipe.
JT uses malted wheat flour type 85 (85 mg minerals per 10g flour) and all purpose flour. I only have excess to wheat flour type 550 (55 mg minerals) and type 1050 (105mg minerals), so I sat down with the excel sheet of the formula and start calculating. At the end I came down with a mixing ratio of type 1050 and 550 that should yield a similar dough as mixing type 85 and all purpose flour.
I love (kitchen)experiments. And when they are bubbling and fizzing I love them even more. That’s the reason why I could not resist when I read about raisin sourdough on Chaosqueen’s Kitchen. I read about rising wild yeast that are living on dry fruits on Pain de Martin and Orignial Yeast, too.
And it is really simple to prepare this kind of sourdough. Organic raisins are mixed with honey sugar water and kept on a warm place. After 5 days the mixture bubbled strongly and had a strong alcoholic smell. The Raisin water (without the raisins) is then mixed with flour to create the sourdough.
Michael Suas recommend in “advanced bread and pastry” to create a sweet starter to bake sweet bread like Panettone or Pandoro. Due to rising this starter on high temperature and many feedings, the growth of wild yeast is encourage as wells as the growth of homfermenting lactobacilli while bacteria producing acetic acid are inhibited by the high temperature. This produce a very vigorous but jet very mild tasting sourdough.
We need this very vigorous starter because the high amount of sugar and butter in the dough of Pandoro or Panettone inhibits the growth of yeast.
To keep the starter on a constant temperature I placed it in my microwave and turn the light on (just the light, not the microwave!). The light bulb produce enough warmth to heat the microwave to 30°C what is perfect for the starter. Continue reading