BakerAunt
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On Saturday afternoon, I made another try at the “3 Grain Bread,” recipe from Breads, Breads, & More Breads (#37), a Pillsbury cook booklet from the 1980s. (The bread is misnamed, as it counts AP flour as a different grain from whole wheat.) The adaptation I did the week of October 13 did not rise well and was dense. This time, I again used the additional whole wheat and rye. I decided to do half medium and half dark rye, in part because the medium rye is more expensive, and I want to save it for another recipe. I replaced the 3 Tbs. butter with 2 ½ Tbs. olive oil, since I like how the olive oil works in Len’s famous Whole Wheat/Rye/Semolina bread. I replaced ¼ cup bran with ¼ cup flax meal, and I again used 2 cups buttermilk. The additional ¼ cup of water, and another ½ cup bread flour, as well as a bit more honey and 4 ½ tsp. yeast resulted in two beautiful loaves of bread now cooling on a rack on my counter. Both rises were long: the first one as 80 minutes and the second an hour. I don’t know if that is the dough or due to a cooler house. I did the rises on the dining room table, as the heat from the wood stove wafts up, so it is around 71F there. I tried a different shaping technique, based on the discussions at Nebraska Kitchen. After pre-shaping, I did not fold the dough but pressed it down just a bit, then tucked it around all the edges, being sure to seal the seam on the bottom. It worked on these loaves, which baked in 9x5 bread pans. I look forward to slicing a loaf for lunch tomorrow.
I thought that Sift was becoming increasingly glitzy in trying to appeal to the demographic that Zen (now Pyewacket) dubbed "boutique bakers." I find that ironic in that this group is the most unlikely to pick up the magazine. The former publication, The Baking Sheet, in its last two iterations before ceasing publication, were more focused on the practical baker. With those publications I felt that I belonged to a group of bakers that wanted to learn and grow. I never felt that with Sift, which had a bit for beginning bakers but seemed to focus more on less everyday items.
I don't think King Arthur will have another regular publication.
I'm not sure what KAF uses for converting its recipes to metric weights, but when I made a mostly spelt bread, I discovered that it only comes out well if I use their volume measurements. When I checked, volume against grams, the grams listed were much lower than what the flour actually weighs. Thus, the bread didn't work with the gram measurements and the dough was too wet, but when I used the volume measurements, I had a nice loaf of bread. Here's the recipe.
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/honey-spelt-sourdough-bread-recipe
I posted a comment, but KAF did not respond to it. Although another person mentions no problem with weights, I wonder if that person was using the English (used to be listed) rather than the metric weights. I seem to recall that I noted a discrepancy with metric measurements in another recipe as well. So, for KAF recipes, I don't trust the metric weights, and I measure by volume.
