What is the role of salt in sourdough baking, and how much do I need to use? Salt serves several purposes in breadmaking: • It slows down fermentation, to help achieve more flavour development without overfermenting or overproofing. • It prevents yeasts from eating all the sugars, helping to make a caramelised crust. • It strengthens the gluten strands, to help make dough more elastic. • It is a natural preservative, reducing the rate of staling by binding water within the bread, keeping it...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Are ancient grains healthier than modern wheat?The answer is “it depends”. It depends on how they’re grown, the soil, the growing season, and many other factors.I’ve written an article exploring the differences between wheat and ancient grains, and what determines how healthy a grain is. Read the full article May your bread be deliciously healthy. Floury regards, Kate Blog | Instagram | Facebook | X | Pinterest 600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246Unsubscribe · Preferences
14 days ago • 1 min read
Curing is an important aspect of bread baking that is often overlooked. For 100% whole grain baking, proper curing makes a huge difference to the quality of the bread. I’ve recently been answering questions in a couple of fresh milled flour baking groups on Facebook (and I’ve also created my own, please join and ask questions!). One of the things that often comes up with beginner bakers is a shot of the inside of a loaf with a comment that it was really dense and gummy. Sometimes, all that is...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Many sandwich bread recipes require a mixing machine or lots of hand kneading. I wanted to create a whole grain sourdough sandwich bread recipe that uses the less intensive stretch and fold technique, and I’m so happy to share it with you today. Based on a French style of sandwich bread called pain de mie, this loaf uses milk instead of water in the dough, for a lovely soft crumb, along with butter, which adds to the softness, and helps it stay fresh for longer. Just the right amount of honey...
28 days ago • 1 min read
I’ve been getting some questions about the phytic acid in whole grains and sourdough, and thought it would be a good idea to go into detail about how this works, and why you don’t need to be alarmed about it.Along with a bunch of good stuff that is not in refined flours, phytic acid is present in whole grains. If phytic acid is not broken down by the phytase enzyme by soaking, sprouting, or fermenting, it can bind to the iron, zinc, magnesium, and calcium in the grain, making it so these...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I grew up in a time and place with weird measurements. Often the handwritten recipes on my mother’s recipe cards would have some ingredients in grams and some ingredients in cups, some cookbooks would be in metric and others in cups, and for some reason our measuring cups were bigger than other ones from around the world. In my early days of learning to cook from scratch, I would always measure by volume, because I didn’t own a scale, but in more recent years I’ve found that a scale can be a...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Einkorn is an ancient grain that is rapidly gaining popularity for its nutty taste and easy digestibility. Swapping einkorn for wheat is not as simple as swapping wheat for other ancient grains such as emmer or Khorasan. You can simply use emmer and Khorasan in sourdough bread as if they were wheat with no adjustments at all, but einkorn behaves a bit differently. Much of the einkorn flour out there is refined in the same way that sifted wheat flour is refined, and will behave even more...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
A typical oven loses a lot of heat when the door is opened to put your loaves in. Some of this heat loss is due to hot air escaping, and some of it is because of the cold dough you are adding. The more thermal mass your oven has, the less heat it will lose. The less heat that your oven loses at the start of baking, the better start your bread has towards getting a caramelised crust and beautiful oven spring. How to provide thermal mass • Baking in a preheated cast iron dutch oven achieves...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Why do some bakers recommend baking as high as 500ºF? And why do some recipes say to bake at 350ºF? These temperature recommendations are mostly to do with personal preferences, and also whether the bread is enriched with butter, sugar, milk, or anything else. A perfectly baked loaf A brown, caramelised crust will mean that the crumb of the bread will also have more flavour, as the crumb ‘breathes in’ flavour from the crust. For that caramelisation to happen, there needs to be some residual...
2 months ago • 2 min read
What makes this sourdough pizza crust magic is its flexibility. You can make this same dough, and depending on your schedule, there are three different timelines you can work with: You can make this as a simple same-day pizza dough instead of overnight - if your kitchen is warm it will take around six hours to ferment, or a bit longer if it’s cold. To develop more flavour, and have a more flexible schedule, instead of making this as a same-day sourdough pizza dough recipe, it can also be...
3 months ago • 3 min read
