I am a beginner and am looking for a bread cookbook to explain the basics while I get my feet wet.  What is the best break cookbook in your opinion?

I've been using the Carl Griffith starter and love the flavor. My question: is there a different flavor associated with a "homegrown" starter vs. the one I've been using? Or do all starters produce the same flavor in the finished product?

Ria

A bread contest is going on at the site "Pham Falate"

if you want to take a look and vote for your favorite,  here is a link - lots of wonderful breads there, I already put 8 on my list to "try very soon"   :-)

http://www.phamfatale.com/bread-contest/

for fermentation, resting and proofing? Or, do you...

I am trying to learn so I read a lot about building bread, but one (well, one at a time) thing I keep seeing, I don't get.  For example, I was just reading about making Scali on SteveB's web site at Bread Cetera. Thank you Steve, that is a great site, and the breads are gorgeous. There are multiple references to rising and resting at different and very specific temperatures for a specified time.  I see resting the biga overnight at 70F.  I see the ferment at 76F for 1 hour and 15 minutes, and I see proofing at 74F for 1 1/2 hours.  I see all this, and I understand it, but how do you do it?

How do you manage to control your temperatures so precisely in order to follow those instructions?  My house has variable and not all that well controlled temperatures.  They rarely, and never predictably, match the requirements of any given recipe at any particular time.  Is it as simple (not to say easy) as learning to vary the times to compensate for the temperatures?  Cooler takes longer, and warmer takes less time?  Those variations have to have an impact on the results though.  Can you compensate for that as well, or do you just take what comes of it?  I need help getting my brain around this so I can start trying to practice it.

OldWoodenSpoon

I've been having total hit or miss luck with my parchment paper. if I make something with oil, like foccacia bread, it sticks to it hard. If I make scones and just lightly spray it with oil, it seems I end up with either the paper sticking to the scones or the scones coming off just right.

I'm curious, could this be a quality issue with parchment paper? Am I just using cheap stuff (I just grabbed a box at the store)? Should I try to just find that oil "sweet spot"?

Any insights to the "subtleties" of parchment paper would be much appreciated. And yes I'm aware of silpads, I'd rather just use the parchment paper.

Hello to all the bakers and Loafers!  I'd posted about 5 months ago about my upcoming camping journey around the Mediterranean, and received so much wonderful advice...  I can't thank everybody enough for their kind, helpful ideas, or begin to tell all the traveling tales.  

Apart from a broken camp stove (aaah!) I did discover a number of fantastic, unique local breads, but I will have to wait to post some pictures and descriptions of those (though I promise I will!)...

But as I'm sure so many of you can imagine, now that my husband and I have returned to our home in Hungary, I'm enthralled just to have an oven again!  Every day has featured me dancing around a new bread, and it's been a blast - but it's high time I share a bit!

Though my husband, David, disagrees, I think this recipe has been my favorite new bread thus far...

Greek Fennel, Yogurt, and Honey Bread

I unearthed this recipe in The Bread Book, by Sara Lewis, which my little brother's girlfriend gave to me last December.  I'd never heard of it, but I very much enjoy the breads it's offered.  Both my husband and I try to eat as healthily as we can, so I admit this recipe has been somewhat modified, and though sometimes this leads to problems I was entirely satisfied, and if fact declared it my best ever!  Multiple times! 

On our camping trip, we spent a month in Greece, between beaches and ancient ruins, and found a lot of fabulous flavors - yogurt featured prominently, as did spices like fennel, anise, and sesame.  This evoked it for me...  It's very sweet, with a dense but extremely soft crumb, and a soft, pliable crust, and filled with the flavor of the fennel seeds and a tad of citrus.  

These ingredients, by the way, are scaled down to an individual loaf, for me, because my husband doesn't like sweet breads, but it's easy to multiply as desired. 

Ingredients:

165 grams flour

3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast

1-3 teaspoons honey (all depending on your personal taste for sweetness)

(dough enhancers I utilized):

2 teaspoons vital wheat gluten

pinch of ginger 

1 teaspoon lemon juice

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

2 oz. + 2 teaspoons yogurt (warmed to room temperature)

2 oz. warm water

Extra honey, milk, and fennel seeds (to glaze)

Instructions:

Whisk a little bit of the flour, yeast, honey, lemon juice, and water in a large bowl to autolyze for 3-5 minutes.  

Add the fennel seeds and yogurt and blend well to distribute the seeds.

Add the salt and the rest of the flour and knead with floured hands on a well-floured board.  With the large proportion of honey, the dough will be extremely sticky at first, but after ten minutes of kneading it tends to become smooth.  Knead for 15 minutes, or until the dough is elastic and does not break if stretched.  

Allow dough to rise in a covered bowl until doubled, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.  

Remove dough from bowl and give it several soft kneadings and envelope turns.  On a lightly greased baking sheet, shape into a spiraled loaf, like a cinnamon bun.  

Allow loaf to rise for 45 minutes or so, while preheating the oven to 210 degrees Celsius.  

Lightly glaze loaf with milk, sprinkle with extra fennel seeds, and drizzle with honey, especially in the creases of the spiral (yum!).

After rising time, bake for 15 - 20 minutes or until shiny and golden brown, with an inner temperature of 205 degrees Fahrenheit.  

Allow to rest and cool - and enjoy!

p.s. if anybody would care to look at some travelogue accounts and photographs of our Mediterranean trip, as well as here in Hungary (currently how we are making our own wine), my blog address is http://erzsebetgilbert.blogspot.com...

So this weekend I went for another round of the Anis baguettes. I am loving the recipe--so tasty, so crusty! Plus the practice (and video tutorials posted around here--thanks!) are definitely helping me work on slashing and shaping.

Which brings me to my current question. I thought I did a pretty good job (for me) with the slashing this time. And the cuts definitely opened nicely in the oven as far as shape goes. But I'm not getting any sort of color/texture/crust distinction between the slashed areas and the rest of the crust. Here's a picture, you can see that the loaf is springing and opening, but it's pretty much an even brown all over, like the cut is just a shaped ridge...

This happens similarly with my sourdough, so I figure it's something I'm doing, as opposed to an issue with the dough itself. Any ideas?

I am looking for empty five and ten pound flour sacks to repack organic stoneground flour.  Unfortunately, a company with initials KA would not provide a source for the bags and I was somewhat disappointed that they would not share that information.

Does anyone have a lead on bags, stitched or unstitched?

Tallahassee Baker Paul

Yesterday I baked a loaf of bread using spelt flour.  It tastes great and is soft and moist with a decent crust.  Today I had some with my lunch and noticed it broke apart a bit.  It is soft and definitely not dry...is there something to add to prevent this from happening?  It is the spelt loaf off the Arrowhead Mills spelt flour bag.

How about citrus marmalade?