tekobo

It must be that time of year. We just trimmed our apple trees and bought a small wood chipper. @Basher turned me on to potentially using home grown wood for smoking but I think he intended that the wood be kept for a while to dry out before chipping. Our chipper is designed to work on green wood so I am planning to chip and then dry. The sample chips we have made so far look just like normal wood chips that you would buy for smoking so I am hopeful that we will get a good outcome. I plan to use them in my smoke pot for low and slow. Like the others I use Lumberjack pellets in the Dennis smoker.

Superb all round @Pequod

I was interested in this when I looked at your spreadsheet Syzygies. I too have a spreadsheet and, because I am not yet varying recipes, it primarily exists to give me some sense of what time things will be done and to adjust if that looks like being the middle of the night. Since I learned about leaving dough overnight in the cellar at the bulk fermentation stage I have not worried so much about timings and stopped using the spreadsheet. What is interesting about your approach is that your long "in cellar" stage is the autolyse stage. Helpful to know because I have been going max 4 hrs on autolyse when, sometimes, it might have been convenient (and better) to let the autolyse run for longer say if my levain isn't quite where it should be. Maybe one day I will get to the stage of tweaking to compensate for the hydration levels in the levain but for now I will simply steal your recipe and see how it works for me. Thanks.

Yo @Lance. That is fighting talk! You and your grill had better live up to it when you get together. Have you a delivery date yet?

Lovely looking loaf @Pequod, raisin and all!

Hey Bruce. Shame about not getting to sail away into the sunset but glad you had fun anyway.

I just stopped work for a little while and stood at my kitchen counter to eat something that sounds disgusting but was delicious. A slice of seeded rye with marmalade and a tinned sardine on top. Great combo. I used this combination of clear plastic container and sieve. Soaked the grain for 6 hours to start with, drained and then rehydrated for a minute or so twice a day, drained and tipped the drained grain into the plastic container. Left container on kitchen counter. Did this for three days and then made the bread. The maths was fun. Weight of dry grain was said to increase by 65% so I stood in kitchen trying to figure out what to ask Alexa to calculate. End weight divided by 1.65 was my solution and, on that basis, there wasn't much wasted at the end. I couldn't quite bring myself to use the remaining sprouted rye in salad, smelled just a little too funky for me Funny. I felt grown up, branching out from making standard boules to using a loaf "tin" instead. The silicone form couldn't quite cope with the bulk and bulged out at the side a little. I am planning on my next loaf, using buckwheat. The recipes are from the Tartine No 3 book and the rye loaf is called Rene's rye.

Finally! These rye loaves were made of equal proportions of flour and a mix of sprouted rye grain and seeds with a very small amount of malt extract and lots of water. Simply delicious.

What's the story with the Trimaran Bruce? Sounds like huge fun to get to build and go out in your own boat.

I was hoping this thread would encourage some other photographic contributions. Obviously I don't qualify as I wasn't old enough to have a date in the seventies. 😅

Jump in, the water's great! Seeded breads are great and yours looks better than many of my attempts. I am about to try a sprouted rye with a whole bunch of seeds in. Hoping it works out better than my last attempt at a heavy rye bread - it was inedible.

Yeah. The Husband calls Brussel sprouts "fart bombs" and refuses to eat them. I once scared a man in the supermarket by saying "my husband's away", while lovingly packing Brussel sprouts into a bag for my dinner. He thought I was making a pass at him and shot away, like a scalded cat. Thanks for your cabbage technique. Like you, no cabbage cook is quite the same and I wondered how you did yours. I have some fab cane and pepper vinegar that a friend brought back from the West Indies. Makes grilled cabbage very tasty indeed.

Awesome camping trip @ckreef. Did you sneak back home for a shower and other stuff? I love grilled cabbage. Care to share your recipe and process?

No guns here. Although my old dad just told me about the gun his American friend gave him when he visited him in Nigeria recently. Dad thinks I should be reassured by the fact that he practised on a firing range with a family friend. I reminded him that was over 55 years ago. Hmmm. What I have done is disobeyed @Pequod's advice about not chasing high hydration in my doughs. Step away from the water he said. Learn to handle your dough better. Well, I had this 60% kamut dough and the Tartine folk said that they push the hydration over 90%. So....I held my breath and dove in.

I have a Spanish friend who cooks great paella on his BGE. When this lockdown is over I am going to get a tutorial off him. A little less scary than wok cooking and I think the KK enclosed cooking environment should make v good paella.

Did lots of smoking yesterday. Lamb shoulder in one KK, pheasant breasts for the neighbour in the other followed by a pork "hand" which I marinaded in jerk spices and rum. Yum. Here is the lamb. Having been rude about air fryers, I bought one with some store vouchers that we had and am very impressed. I am also very happy to report that I have subverted the low fat premise of an air fryer. Here I give you brat kartoffeln with lots of butter. Yum

Loving your plants @Troble and your vegetable boxes are giving me ideas about what I can do in my home garden. Looks like you are going to have lots and lots of fun!

Run while you can, sweet child. I was once like you. I made jokes and mocked the Mockmillers. Bread came from the Czech couple down the road who have built up a fabulous bakery and business and our guest flours came in the form of einkorn loaves from our monthly farmer's market. And now? I am a bread obsessive, finding people to foist my bread onto so that I can make more, ever more, in the search for that elusive, perfect loaf. Run, run, run!

I use mine all the time as a heat deflector. I wrap the tray in foil and add water to reduce the smoke from drippings that might otherwise burn off. Were the holes to stop warping or to diffuse rather than deflect the heat? I have had no problems with warping, even when the dish was placed directly on the bars of the fire basket. Anyway, have fun with your new to you toy.

The look is sometimes disappointing but home made bread (almost) always tastes great. Einkorn loaf and mussels made for a simple, tasty lunch yesterday.

Thanks! Soon to be added to cart.

Ha ha. Have fun Aussie! And good luck for when we get out the other side of all of this.

Lots to respond to. Like you, @Syzygies, I was planning on taking a course in bread and/or pizza making. Ironically it was with a flour milling company in Northern Italy, called Petra. I decided against doing it this year, before corona hit, because it was for pros and my bread and Italian skills are not yet up to that level of assault. Maybe by next year this won't be such a risky endeavour. I don't think I have proved much with this one success. Maybe that my starter isn't 'strong' enough to rise a whole loaf using the small amounts of starter that Chad Peterson recommends. In any case, I will approach my next loaf with a bit more confidence with the stiffer leaven by my side. I did order a cheap digital PH meter in the depths of my despair. When it arrives it may give me more data about how my leaven varies for different bakes. This tips and tricks thread isn't meant to be scary and I fear that my trials may put others off. I have had great success in the past using yeast or yeast and leaven. My current desire is to explore the options with leaven alone and that is what is causing me pain. @Basher, that old adage about using the "best" ingredients was never truer than here. If one doesn't get the leaven right, your bread literally falls at the first hurdle. I am waking my starter back up with a view to trying some einkorn bread in the next day or so. Good luck with yours. Here we did a weird lockdown dance yesterday. A couple of baking friends were out of flour, as are all the usual sources. I had to leave some in my porch so one of them could pick it up. Both very happy to be able to start feeding their starter again. I have the Suas book recommended by @Syzygies but have not gotten into it yet. I am a leap in and do it sort of person and have found you tube videos with Chad Peterson, Trevor J Wilson and Rubaud useful for checking my technique. The book I have started to read is called Living Bread by Daniel Leader. I like the look of all the variations you get on basic bread from around the world and look forward to trying them once I have a better handle on doing the basics. One day, one day, I will get around to making a baguette. Two residual questions from me: how do you all store your home made bread? I slice and freeze excess but have not found a reliable way to keep bread fresh if I don't freeze it. It dries out on the counter and goes soft in an airtight container. Should I just get an old fashioned bread bin or is there a secret piece of kit yet to be revealed to me? I wondered if the proofer would be a good storage box. Second question is that I still don't know what these "seedlings" are for. Any ideas? I wrote to the Austrian company that I bought them from but have had no response - probably busy coping with COVID-led demand. And yes, I know how to rotate pictures. No, I don't know why this one stubbornly refuses to upload the right way up.

Congratulations @BIGSHEP. I imagine it must feel great to finally have your very own KK. Awesome.

I have been struggling mightily with my bread making recently. I had got to a stage where most loaves came out well and then things started to go wrong about a month ago and I have been delivering variations on shrunken, flat loaves consistently. Aaaargh. There were so many variables that I struggled to fix the problem, no matter how many times I tried to test an individual stage or method. I even resorted to re-reading other's posts and noted that @Syzygies talked about his flat as a pancake period and how minute doses of ascorbic acid helped him out of it. I didn't want to add yet another variable so I persisted with one last experiment over the last two days. Here is my journey for those who are novices like me. First I mixed and scoop kneaded the dough, using Trevor J Wilson's method. Got that tip from one of @Pequod's posts. Actually, that wasn't the first thing I did. Begin at the beginning. This record is going to be important for when something goes wrong again. This experiment was to test whether my move from one method of making leaven to another was part of the problem. I had been using a stiff leaven, made with 1 part starter to 1 part water to 2 parts flour. My loaves over the last month used Chad Peterson's leaven recipe which is made up of 1 tablespoon of starter to 200g of flour and 200g of water. Weird juxtaposition of tablespoons with grams and much less starter relative to flour in Chad's method. I ended up being busy and left the leaven to rise for longer than my usual 6 hours. It was much closer to 15 hours by the time I got to mixing the leaven in to the dough. I milled the spelt and wheat grain and hydrolysed with 85% water for about two hours before adding the salt and leaven. Adding the leaven and salt later is another Trevor J Wilson recommendation. Works for me in that I can get the flour hydrolysing in parallel with waiting for the leaven to peak. It was 9pm by the time I had finished scoop kneading the dough so I was in no mood to stay up all night folding at half hourly intervals for four hours before shaping so I put the two, separate lots of dough with the Chad leaven on the left and the Bertinet stiff leaven on the right, in bowls in the cool cellar. Cool bulk fermentation like this is great for allowing you to bake sourdough when you are ready and rather than having to stick to strict timings. The dough looked good when I got to it in the morning. I then formed it into balls for the bench rest. I used damp hands to avoid adding too much flour . Here are the balls after the bench rest. Relaxed but the not too flat so I figured they were good to be shaped to go in the banettons. I have been having problems with sticky dough adhering to the banettons so I liberally floured the top of the dough balls and the banettons before laying the balls in the baskets. The good news is that the dough already felt less sticky than normal at this stage. I got the extra rack in the proofer to allow for proofing two loaves at once. Here they are, going in for four hours or so. And here they are looking wet but plump after proofing. I had a load of calls for work yesterday but had marked out my schedule to say when to put the oven on, when to put the dough in and when to get it out between calls. I dashed down to check on progress and this is what I found. It was a dance around the kitchen moment. The lower loaf was better risen than my more recent attempts but it was still flatter than the beautifully plump loaf on the top rack using the stiffer leaven. Letting the leaven go for longer may have helped both bakes but the stiffer dough was the clear winner for me. I wondered if the lesser amount of starter in the Chad leaven will have been expended sooner but, given all my previous attempts used his leaven after about six to ten hours I don't think that the timing is the main reason for the difference. Looking lovely during the agonising two hour wait for cooling. You can't have everything. Still some big holes in the crumb. Something to work on. In the meantime, The Husband delivered half of the plump loaf to my father-in-law as part of his lockdown care package. Father-in-law was very happy with progress and remarked on the softness and plumpness of the loaf. At last.