Bread

Do you have a good straight blade chefs knife? Have never been convinced that a serrated bread knife is necessary for cutting bread. Apparently the serrated blades are intended to cut soft bread without crushing it....a normal blade works much better for crusty bread in my experience.

All my knives are Wusthof these days and I particularly like their bread knife, it works really well and has retained its sharpness superbly.

https://www.knivesandtools.co.uk/en/pt/-wusthof-classic-ikon-bread-knife-23-cm.htm

Any Wusthof or Zwilling

I got one of these it seems pretty good

Any Wusthof or Zwilling

Our Zwilling was amazing but became blunt after about 5 years of use. Pretty happy with that longevity for the prie we paid but I'm not a fan of having knives that aren't sharpenable in general.

You can sharpen serrated blades, does take longer and requires a bit more care obvsly.

Well, I can certainly use a correct size honing rod to work on each notch but even if I spent several hours on it, the knife is never as sharp as new, which is what I consider sharpenable to mean....can you restore it to how sharp it was when you bought it?

Could totally be doing something wrong, but I stand by my comment. Once a bread knife loses its initial sharpness its near impossible to get it back.

true that, I could never bring it back to original

You've given me the nudge I needed though...going to go and have a crack at it. Haven't tried for a few years.

full report on my desk in the morning

Cheers all. I do have a decent chef's knife (which I'm pretty sure is Wusthof) which I'll test out as a rebel bread knife.

I like the look of the Tojrio one, did you get hit with any import fees @rj ?

The Mercer Millenia one from Amazon, is cheap, but works extremely well. Thinking of getting an Opinel bread knife or a Victorinox rosewood pastry knife, as the Mercer is not very aestheically pleasing...

I think I bought it from Amazon and it was shipped from Japan with no fees

Not sure what happened here. One giant bubble not much rise.

Can someone recommend me a decent method

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That was the dough. Pretty wet. But the recipe I was following reenforced that it should be wet

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Under developed or over proved I'd say... Possibly too wet if you were following an American recipe as their flour tends to hold more water.

The big bubble is caused by the lack of gluten structure allowing bubbles to merge. You can see the bubbles you have got are all quite tall, the bubbles have expanded upwards rather than evenly.

If you can figure out what went wrong then "bad" breads are more valuable than the good ones I think, as you can learn and refine your technique. They still taste good too!

40%spelt with sesame seeds

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I split the dough in half I had added some more flour to dry it out a bit. Kneaded a bit. Over night prove then in the oven.

It’s risen but weirdly only on one side

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Back in the oven without the lid now, but it's already one of my best ones so far.

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Looks good.

I had stuff on and ended up leaving my levain out for two days, it went flat, so I fed it a bit last night and made loaf this morning. In the fridge to prove today, will see how it turns out. Not expecting great things but better than wasting it.

I've had a long series of duds due to constantly having people over making it impossible to get my timing right, they're not often great but they're usually still better than storebought so a win in my book.

Happy with the crust on this one too, only 15 minutes without lid made it a bit chewy whilst still having a crispy outside, I think I've been overdoing them before as I prefer this slightly underdone version.

Scoring inspiration came from @dancing james loaf a couple posts back.

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Yeah that was exactly it. Made some for my friends who were visiting and Put ours to the side where it had to wait. Came out pretty good, all things considered, as I made the levain on Friday.

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Fucking hell. Some great looking loaves being made

Today’s attempt

50% white
And milled 20% pearl barley, 20% spelt and 10% rye
Diastatic malt added to the flours plus malt flakes in dough and rolled in malt flakes after shaping.

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Diastatic malt

Is that the same as my Gerstenmalzmehl Aktiv (active barley malt flour)? If so, how much do you use? I chucked in a small bag with my last flour order but I'm not quite sure how to use it. I just added 7.5g to 400g of flour (of unknown mixture as its a gift from my sister, I'm just hoping there's no dried yeast in it) right at the start when mixing for autolyse and will see how that goes. But would be nice to get some insight in what it actually does and how much to use. I understood it to basically be MDMA for my sourdough culture, about right?