On Sunday we decided to make some noodles, but my wife wanted to do something other than our usual 2 egg, 3 flour pasta. So we looked around online and found a pretty simple ratio on a Chinese website, 1 egg, 3 water, and 8 flour.

So we mixed up a 48g egg, with 152g water, and 400g flour, let it rest for an hour, and then rolled it out to the medium 5 setting and cut the noodles, cooked them and threw them in some soup. Most of the dough was used up that night, but the real revelation came last night after when we made noodles out of the remaining dough. The noodles from Sunday were good, but Monday dinner was extra springy with some bounce.

In the past we had tried storing leftover noodle dough for a couple nights in the fridge and it had gone bad, so these aren’t things you can let sit too long, but it seems that giving them an extra 24 hours works out very nicely.

This week, I read an article defending bread against all its current detractors.  The claim was fiberless bread is the culprit for all our woes, and it recommended a minimum of 10% fiber relative to carbohydrates.  I had already planned on skipping on the dried fruit this week, so I decided to add some whole wheat flour and crank up the flax seed meal and chia seeds, both of which are pretty heavy in fiber.

This morning, I still hadn’t gotten around to getting whole wheat flour so I started with a regular loaf and went heavy on the additives, but my wife went on a grocery run and picked some up, hence the odd 450g of flour this week.  We also used up the last of our Arrowhead flour which is pretty thirsty, so I dropped the water ratio a little bit until I added the whole wheat which always soaks up a bit of water.  According to my breadsheet, this gets me to 12.4% fiber.

400g all purpose flour (primarily King Arthur this time)
50g whole wheat flour
330g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g chia seeds, soaked in 90g water
60g flaxseed meal, soaked in 120g water

The mix and shape went well with the new SOP’s and the bread came out great.  It’s a little flat as usual, but I suspect I need to get a larger dutch oven if I want it to rise a little more.  You can see the flecks of whole wheat but at 10% its doesn’t affect the flavor or texture at all.  I think the flaxseed is very, very oily which is why the crust is more akin to one of my enriched breads, but that’s just fine.  As for the whole wheat I’m thinking about trying to get the ratio crazy high, but to do it in 10% increments so that when my wife says enough, I’ll know to stop.  Next week will definitely be 20%.

Anyone with a sourdough starter needs a good backup plan for using it up without baking.  The easy answers are to compost it or make pancakes.

This pancake recipe is a modified from what I found online, with sugar and baking soda way reduced, and simplified due to laziness.

±240g (1 cup) starter
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon baking soda or baking powder, whatever you got.

The process is quite simple also.  Preheat your skillet with butter, medium heat. Mix up all the ingredients real good.  Drop in a couple spoonfuls of batter into the skillet.  Flip after a minute or two. Flip again after a minute.  Do it again.  Makes three or four pancakes.  Add butter and syrup.  Eat.

If you look at the Michael Ruhlman’s ratio for pancakes, you’ll see that we’ve essentially backed into his formula.  2 flour : 2 water : 1 egg : 1/2 fat.  The recipe above its 120g flour : 120g water : 50g egg : 28g olive oil.

However, don’t let the false exactness of the ratios confuse you, my recipe is very loose.  If I have a bigger egg or less starter, it will just be little flatter.  If you want it fluffier, add more baking soda. If you want to make a crepe, add a second egg and skip the baking powder. If you’re short on starter, just add equal parts flour and water and definitely throw in more baking powder.

Ultimately this recipe is all about burning up your leftover starter.  This will be especially important if you get into the Chad Robertson’s Tartine method, where you refresh your starter a couple times before making the dough.  I hate waste, so I usually skip the refresh (which is a polite way to say throw away most of the starter and feed the remainder) and just live with a slower rise and miss out on any smidgen of extra flavour profile I’d otherwise obtain.

But even then, I still occasionally need to burn up starter. Feeding the little fellow for another week’s hibernation is a doubling exercise, requiring at least an equal amount of fresh material.  So if I have 100g of starter, I need to add 50g of flour and 50g of water. You can see where this will lead if left unchecked, and pancakes is our buffer.

And it’s also where my girl started cooking.  So it’s sentimental too.

Nothing particularly special about this bread.  It is very similar to last week’s bread, except that I used the starter straight out of the fridge (my usual process) and now that the dried figs and apricots are gone, we opened up a giant bag of dried mangoes, to the great delight of our daughter!

400g flour
300g water
100g starter (the usual 50/50 mix)
10g salt
60g rehydrated mangos
40g chia seeds, soaked in 60g water
40g flaxseed meal, soaked in 80g water

Since the starter came out cold from the fridge, the proof started slow which was further retarded because the dough went into the fridge so we could attend Winnie the Pooh at the Rainbow Company Youth Theater.  The show was was great fun even I don’t think our daughter quite follow the story.

On Monday evening, I put the dough in the oven’s proof function and it rose high enough to bake.  Like the previous couple weeks, the dough was still cool to the touch when I shaped it, but for once it wasn’t overproofed.  Per my new standard operating procedure, the oven temperature was held at 450f, and only the pot was preheated without the lid.  I tried using silicone pot holders instead of oven mitts for the first time. It worked perfectly well and meant I didn’t have to fully dry off my hands after washing off any dough from the final shaping.

The bread came out nicely, with a lighter crumb than the last couple weeks.  I am generally satisfied with the flavor my loaves, even if I don’t push the limits of proofing my bread.  Ken Forkish recommends pushing the proof as long as possible, but given the downsides of overdoing it, I really need to get his voice out of my head.  I’m certain he is giving good advice for competitive bakers, but it really isn’t the hassle for someone like me.

As for the mangoes, I can’t tell the difference between this and the previous loaves.  Next week, I’ll just leave out the dried fruit and spare us the added sugar.