Okay, I haven’t been baking non-stop all weekend, but I did get a few things done. I couldn’t let the extra time go to waste. My choice of what to make often revolves around what is convenient ingredient and time wise. Apparently I’m all about jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread lately. So why fight it?
First thing I did was feed all my cultures. And I saved some cast-off to make sourdough waffles.
First bread up is the Golden Raisin Bread. This one calls for a culture plus a little bit of commercial yeast. I still have two cultures I haven’t used yet, so this made use of one, the Alaska. With a good % of whole wheat flour and some rolled oats thrown in for good measure, this turned out to be a pretty hearty and healthy bread. My slashing is definitely a problem. Nothing I’ve tried is sharp or thin enough to do the job properly. I have some proper lames on the way though.
Those went off without any problems. But I do dumb stuff from time to time. Like, I’ve had a dough rising in then oven, forgot and turned on the oven to preheat. Der. This weekend my dumb thing was to have the olive levain dough on top of my stove while the oven was preheating for the raisin bread. Oh yeah, on the burner above the oven vent. So I ended up cutting a chunk of that dough off. See, here is the olive dough cooking away on the burner with the raisin dough next to it and my waffle batter.
So, I kind of thought I might have killed the olive levain, but I continued as planned anyway. After a couple of folds, I shaped it and put it in the fridge to retard for what ended up being about 24 hours. It came out of the fridge a little sloppy and flat, so I kind of pulled it back into an oblong loaf shape, slashed it, spritzed it with water and threw it in the oven to bake, a couple of ice cubes chucked in the bottom for steam. Sure enough, it started rising. I hadn’t killed all the yeast! Sure, I lost some oven spring, but it still turned out wonderful. It has received nothing but compliments so far. I can only imagine how good it’ll be if I don’t try to ruin it!
