desGroles

Today's breads were made with a flour that is easy to handle and shape, because it is nice and strong.

However, in previous bakes I've found it slow to increase in volume during the final proof. The breads have just been denser and less open than I think the flour can do, and I think that I've been baking too soon and not giving it enough time to properly fill the bannetons.

Today is the first time I've got an open crumb with this flour. The trick, it seems was to take it out of the fridge and place in the proofer for 1.5 hours, then back in the fridge to chill before baking.

This bread is about 79% of this flour, 18% whole wheat and 3% vital wheat gluten. Final hydration is about 76% but I start at 70% and increase it with a bassinage step.

A lot of us are experimenting with different ways of baking - driven by high energy prices or issues with a constant supply of electricity, as we have in South Africa.

So, I took a bread in banneton along to a family member who has recently purchased a Kenwood 25l "air fryer oven" which can operate as a convection oven as well, and uses only 1.7kW of electricity, so is more feasible to be powered by solar panels during the day.

The benefit to this little oven is that it claims to reach the 230°C after only 6 minutes - which is far faster than my oven which I give an hour! This is probably where the greatest electricity savings could be realized.

Still learning how to bake with this one - we did 30 minutes in a covered casserole on the bake setting at 230°C (446°F) - followed by another 20 minutes reduced to 200°C (392°F) uncovered. Even after 50 minutes the bread was still pale so we used the air-fryer setting to brown it for a further 10 minutes.

The resultant bread was lovely, the sesame smell really carried through the house that I don't normally get with a normal bake!

This was a lovely bread, even if the shape wasn't as good as it could be - didn't get an ear as it was still fairly slumpy on the bake setting - and the top had a darker strip in the middle, but I think with experience and using the air-fryer setting from the beginning it could be possible to consistently get a great loaf with less electricity usage.

Felt like something sweet. The shaping is based on the accordion bread by autumn kitchen (YouTube https://youtu.be/hLlaB2jacKE).

All of the dough was mixed in the mixer with the sweet matcha paste. Then the dough was split in two and cocoa paste was added to half of the dough, and the two doughs were joined together by following the accordion bread video method. White chocolate and some dried pineapple as inclusions.

This was a fun bread too make. I used a raisin yeast water rather than sourdough here because of all the sugar. Next time I'll up the matcha to get more colour yet and more matcha flavour.

After an overnight cold proof in the fridge these were baked the next morning, with a single difference in how they were handled. The loaf on the left with white sesame had an hour in the proofer whilst the oven heated, and the one on the right stayed in the fridge. They were baked together side by side on my baking steel and did touch in the oven.

Odd that it is the one with the ear! A bit counter intuitive that the loaf on the right didn't open up as cleanly even though it had an hour less of "warm" fermentation. It could also be that the loaves touched in the oven and that changed things.

Sometimes, when we do these slight difference tests we don't learn much.

Enjoyed eating these. 10% of the flour was wholemeal einkorn and the other 90% was of a very interesting sifted white bread flour (that contained a lot of red wheat in it) as can be seen by the colour of the crumb.