u/Decided-2-Try

Re-posting because I figured out what I was doing wrong with the photos, so now (hopefully!) they will be visible in the thread preview area. Also adding recipe info.

A couple of experimental loaves started yesterday morning, based on my usual fresh milled honey wheat but substituting 10% (L side, 43g) and 20% (86g) of the wheat flour with besan flour. Thanks to u/jsober for the chats about this.

To the extent the crust on the loaf on the right looks a little darker, I don’t think that’s the extra besan. I thought it looked too dark coming out of the oven, so I added water to my egg-cream wash.

I started at 20% and added more water to account for besan hydrating at more like 110%, which may have been a mistake. It was a gloopy sticky mass after kneading. So, figuring it might end up being a discard, I followed with the 10% dough, to which I added no additional water (I hydrate it normally around 78%), and which also ended up a gloopy sticky mass. Both formed fine and rose fine, though.

Both taste pretty good but the 20% is not suitable for any “sweet” applications (butter/honey, jam, French toast). It’s just got a certain strong “whang” to it that makes it fine for lunch meat mayo/mustard sandwiches, but intrudes too much in sweet stuff.

Not sure I’m going to do this again. It does add some additional protein and beefs up the lysine content. I read some commentary saying it helps from a flavor standpoint if you do a Yudane with the besan, and/or toast it in a dry pan, while others say the oven heat history is all that’s needed in that regard.

The lighter loaf made a really nice toasted cheese sandwich for my older grandson’s lunch. I took him to a park and then here for lunch while his baby brother had a med appt. I cut it into "fingers" and he ate the whole sandwich and half an apple with his favorite Teddy peanut butter for dipping sauce. He also dipped the sandwich fingers in the Teddy. 😄

If anyone is interested in the base freshly-milled flour honey wheat recipe, it's pretty close to Robyn's below, other than adapted for smaller 9x4 loaf pans and backed off a bit on the honey. If you'd like the specifics, mention on comments and I'll edit the main post.

https://robynonthefarm.com/blogs/news/5-ingredient-fresh-milled-flour-honey-whole-wheat-sandwich-bread-great-harvest-bread-co-copycat

I've been milling flour for close to a year now. I really like that I get to control how much bran is in it, and that it has all the nutrients from wheat germ that are largely absent in commercial flours.

This is our daily bread; I make about 3 loaves a week (also supplying my oldest daughter's family). This time I decided to get weird.

I like lupini beans (popular pub snack in Portugal, Spain, Italy, maybe some others but not really popular in the US). To eat them you just squeeze and pop the bean out of the hull, eat the bean flesh, toss the hulls. I also make hummus from lupinis so I started stockpiling a lot of hulls, which are almost entirely insoluble fiber.

I dried the hulls and milled them, then added to the bread recipe. The recipe uses 400g flour and I added 40 g of the lupini powder, so each 2-slice recipe has an additional 5 grams of fiber.

Worked out fine except it did mess with gluten formation some - this bread normally has a much finer crumb.

I also roll the dough in leftover bran before putting it into the loaf pan.

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[EDIT - many thanks to all for offering suggestions and thoughts on this. Given the only variable that has changed is temperature, holy cow why didn't it occur to me to autolyse, knead, and do both rises in the basement where it's still under 70F? I'll try that with tomorrow's loaf.]

I started milling wheat in January and the current recipe quickly became our regular family bread. I've made 2-3 loaves a week since February (sharing also with an adult daughter's family) - so about 60 loaves so far.

The last 2 weeks all loaves have been coming out with the sides kind of sucked in as it comes out of the pan, as you can see in the photo. Whereas all prior to that were shaped nice and square along the sides, according to the pan after removal and cooling.

So far I've tried leaving the bread in the pan for 5 minutes instead of going directly to the cooling rack, thinking it might be kind of gelatinous just out of the oven and maybe would "set up" somewhat with an in-pan rest. I also tried reducing both proofing times from 60 to 40 minutes, so that there's less crowning at the top. And tried turning the pan onto its left and right sides for the final 10 minutes of baking time.

None of these have worked (the bread was still great, just those side indentations). Prior to this issue starting there have been no recipe or method changes, the only thing different in July vs. Feb-April is the kitchen has been 73-74F vs 69-70-ish earlier in the year. But it was 73-74F in June and late May also, and this didn't happen.

Any thoughts? I just want to get my boring, squarish bread back.

Thanks!

My son-in-law and grandson's favorite bread. Three olives (Manzanilla, Castelvetrano, black). About 10 cloves of garlic roasted, plus a little bit of granulated garlic and onion.

The crumby looking stuff atop is bran (I mill my own flour then roll the dough in extra bran I've sifted out). I got a bit out of control (wine was involved) and sprinkled extra atop.

It's not actually this yellowish looking, though. Something not right about my phone's camera in that it adds a bunch of yellow.

I got a wild hair and decided to use chicken broth as the liquid in Brian Lagerstrom's "Easiest Actually Good Baguette You Can Make at Home" recipe (link is below).

I cut the recipe in half for just a single baguette, so in case it was going to be horrible, I wouldn't have wasted too much flour.

The broth was home-made, so I wasn't certain of the salinity. But it tasted pretty similar (salt wise) to Swanson's and the like. So I used their stated sodium content to back-calculate how much salt to use in the recipe.

Not sure but I think the collagen content (which is always pretty high in my broth) changed the crust and made it softer. It was a bit softer than the other times I've used this recipe despite using steam per his instructions.

Also, it's not as yellowish as this in real life. For some reason my phone seems to add a lot of yellow. Maybe it's reading the overhead lighting in ways my eyes can't see.

Next time I make beef broth I'll try that in the same baguette recipe.

Brian's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FR__Gt0CSo

Got my new 700 lift bowl today (a refurb). On the bad side, they shipped me the Candy Apple Red whereas I went back and confirmed my order was the Empire Red.

On the good side, they shipped all stainless steel accessory parts, plus an additional one I wasn't expecting, plus an upgraded (I think??) whisk.

The part they showed in the listing for the dough hook was the old simple "flat" design, not spiral, but they sent me the spiral. Plus it was all stainless, weighing at least 3x as much as the similar spiral hook I have with my existing (which I assume must be cast aluminum). Ditto the scraping mixer blade - it's at least 3x heavier than the (assumed) cast aluminum of my old one.

In the first photo is the extra mixing blade having the horizontal sections running through it - what kind of use is it for? Nice to get a freebie in any event, even though I don't (yet) know what it's for.

The whisk is 11 wires vs my current 6 wire (and vs the 6 wire they were supposed to be sending me) as shown in the 2nd photo. Whereas the 6 wire is mainly symmetrical (basically a circle at the widest portion of the shoulder), this new 11-wire whisk is more rectangular in overall shape, so I'll be interested to see how it handles whipping vs the old one. Oh, plus a dough scraper freebie that wasn't included in the order.

The mixer did not pass the dime test at first, but with the adjustment screw moved about half the distance, now it does.

Overall I guess I can't complain. Except, damn me, that Empire Red would have been much nicer than the Candy Apple Red.

Edit: typo in title, should have written that this is a Ramadan Pidesi or Pide bread, not Pedisi.

I simmered some saffron threads in the milk used to make the milk-flour-yolk wash.

Turned out very tasty. My son and I used it for open-faced gyro sandwiches.

I awoke to find 3 of these spots on the outside of my thigh.

First and second pics are our usual honey wheat sandwich bread except I swapped about 15% of the usual freshly milled whole wheat with teff flour. No particular reason, just curious. I'd done some reading by searching here and it seems going too high on teff content can mess up how it ferments and forms.

Tastes good and makes the whole wheat even darker than usual. You can see that I over-proofed it - had to wait too long for the oven temp to come down from the 450F baking temp of the loaf in the 3rd photo.

Third photo was a small experiment with MSG. I used King Arthur bread flower for this one because it's approaching its use-by date and it's cheaper than my home-milled flour. Also I wanted to know if any processing changes related to the MSG rather than the flour (I'm still working through some kinks on the home-milled).

I wanted to match the called-for sodium, so I used 11 g MSG where this small batch dough would have called for 3.5g of salt.

It mixed, kneaded, stretched, rose just like it always does. Baked fine, too. Taste... not bad, but also not great. Everyone described it as "too umami", and it really started loading your tastebuds the more you ate. I might do another small experiment with half salt and the sodium equivalent of the other half being MSG (still have some remaining KA bread flour to use up).

ETA - forgot to mention the MSG was not honey wheat but rather based on one of Brian Lagerstrom's baguette dough recipes, except I just used a small loaf pan out of laziness.

I grind wheat now and sift it and regrind the bran until it will all pass a #50 sieve (350 microns).

I make a couple of loaves of this honeywheat bread a week as the regular toast and sandwich bread for us and for my daughter's family.

Haven't gotten it quite right yet as the crumb is a bit more open than I want. The powdery look atop is from rolling the dough in extra bran before it goes into the pan. Adds a nice crispiness.

Eta - dang too bad we can't edit titles! Whole not whloe.