Hello from a new guy. I'm really enjoying this site, though it's so large and complex I could get lost for hours. I'm a gluten-free baker, driven to this place by the fact that both my wife and I have Celiac. (She gave it to me.... just kidding!). But I love inventing so GF is actually fun. It's inspired me to create a line of wild leaven GF breads. Will post photos when I get some images that meet my ridiculous standards.

The Question: Anyone out there in the Northern NJ NYC area who runs a wood-fired oven and would be willing to let me bake some GF loaves in it? Or who is contemplating such a thing and wants a co-conspirator? 

Thanks for your interest!

Charles Luce

Hello everyone.  I'm relatively new to baking breads (a couple successful loaves thus far).  I've already started nurturing my own sourdough starter following the pineapple juice method.  It's a bit over a week old now.  I've been drawn to the obsessiveness of baking bread largely due to health and taste reasons.  I just got tired of store bought bread and the slight chemical tastes in them.  Does anyone have any good tried and true whole wheat and white sandwich bread recipes?  My wife and I probably go through a store bought loaf every two weeks.  Would it be best to maybe bake one loaf a week and freeze half of it and then refresh it when needed?  Does the flavor/freshness of the revived bread still beat store bought bread?  Thanks for all of the help, and I look forward to learning with everyone here.

Hi, im relatively new to the world of home baking, done a couple batches of bagels so far, and my 1st loaf of enriched wheat bread is in the oven as I type this, im stoked as halfway through the baking, its looking great! i was happy to find a community site for bakers as well!!

Look out for episode 3 of the new Gourmet TV series 'Adventures with Ruth', screening tomorrow 1 November on PSB in which Richard Bertinet shows Ruth and Oscar Winning actress Diane Weist how to bake bread.

Richard Bertinet is a baker, chef and owner of The Bertinet Kitchen cookery school in Bath, UK.  He has written two award winning books on bread-making Dough - Simple Contemporary Bread (2005 ) and Crust - Bread to get your teeth into (2007).  His third book - a cookery book is due to be published next year.  (All books published by Kyle Cathie in the UK / Kyle Books in the US)

For the trailer for this and other episodes see the Gourmet website at http://www.gourmet.com/adventureswithruth/season-1

For more information about Richard Bertinet and The Bertinet Kitchen visit http://www.thebertinetkitchen.com

Hi everyone,

I'm a 23y/o guy in Toronto who has recently discovered the awesomeness of baking with yeast, so I joined this forum to get some insight, scope out the recipes and hang out with all you fantastic people! Looking forward to learning a lot :D

This is my first post here so I think I should take a moment to introduce myself.  My name is Buddy and I live in San Jose, California.  Almost exactly a year ago, My wife and I went to Tucson, Arizona to visit some relatives.  While doing some shopping, we both noticed that one supermarket was selling Pumpernickle bread.  We both like Pumpernickle and it is almost never available in our area so we vowed to buy some to take back with us.  Needless to say, that didn't happen.  When we got home, we both remarked that we were dissapointed that we didn't get around to buying any Pumpernickle.  I, being a typical guy, who also likes to cook figured, what the heck, I'll make my own.  How hard can it be? 

After several hours of research on the internet tubes, I stumbeled across this site and boy was I in for a surprise.  I had, in the course of my 59 years on this planet, baked a few loaves of bread.  I purchased a couple of bread machines but was never really happy with the "bricks" they produced so I ended up giving them away.  Suddenly, my quest to make Pumpernickle seemed completely daunting.  Bread measured in grams rather than cups?  Hearth baking?  Steaming the oven?  Wild yeast starters?  The whole thing seemed way above my pay grade.  I was pretty sure that home made Pumpernickle was not going to happen in my lifetime.  However, I noticed a beautiful looking reicipie on this site for a Blueberry, creamcheese twist.  I was captivated by the photo and, after reading the instruction thought, "Hey, I can do this!"  I tried it and it came out better than my wildest expectations.  Not only was it beautiful, but it tasted better than anything I had ever purchased from farmer Safeway.  I was excited!  After reading the comments section, I tried all kinds of things with this.  I filled it with Ham and roasted Garlic and Brie, Sausage and Rosemary and Chedder, everything I tried came out wonderful.  I was hooked.  I started reading the book reviews here and finally took the plunge and ordered "THe Bread Bakers Apprentice".  Why that one?  I liked the cover photo.  Go figure.

Being a guy, I only spent a cursory amount of time on the first several chapters and went straight to the Annadama bread.  Having no bread pans, I made a trip to the local supermarket and bought a couple of cheap bread pans and made the bread.  My results were flavorfull but not much to look at.  At about that time, I read a post from Flour Girl's blog http://www.flourgrrrl.com/ about the results of baking in different kinds of pans and decided to try her rec for the La Crueset bread pans.  The results were markedly better with La Crueset and I was off and running.  My kitchen soon sported two La Cruset bread pans, a scale, a couch, a couple of Bennetons, a temp probe, and on and on and I'me having a ball.

Almost a year later, my family thinks I am the best bread maker ever.  I didn't take the Julie and Julia approache to BBA, but rather, skipped to the recipies that looked interesting.  Right now, my biggest problem is that I have so many requests to keep making the breads that I already make that I have no time to try new ones.

Now, to get to the point, One of the third bread recipies I tried to make was Peter Reinhart's Castiello.  I was captivated by the pictures.  It looked really good.  Mind you, I had only been at this for a month or so at that time and the result was, shall we say, underwhelming.  Fine.  I went on to other breads like the Cinnimon Raisen Bread, the Potato Rosemary bread (great croutons and dinner rolls by the way), the Pain A L'ancianne (best baguettes ever!) and didn't give it another thought...until

About a month ago, my wife brought home some tortillias made with Chedder cheese and Jalapino's.  They were wonderful.  I got to thinking, this could work in Peters Castiello bread maybe.  I decided to give it a try.

To Peters recipie, I added 6 oz of whole Jalapino's (canned with the seeds and juices and carrotts and onions ) chopped into a fine dice, about 6 oz. of sausage,  It does not seem to matter what kind, I have tried everything from breakfast sausage to Polska Kilbassa and they all work, and 6 oz of Very sharp chedder, grated, 

I make this bread according to Peters instructions EXCEPT, I throw everything in at once.  I don't wait for the mix to turn into dough before adding the extras, I just mix it all up.  I don't have a machine to mix this with so I just do it by hand useing the turning bowl method. 

I have not been doing this long enouh to make "pretty" bread so I will not post any pictures.  All I can say is that when your 30 year old grandson tells you that this is the "Most awsome bread he has ever tasted"  you feel pretty good.  And, for what it's worth, my pupernickle is not bad either.

I would post the whole recipie here but I'm not sure what the copyriht issues aer and I figure most of you have a copy of BBA.  Also,with  my typing skills, It would take all night.

Really good bread though.

Bud

I joined a while back but have been just reading and lurking. I found this site on a google search for something (too old to remember what!) I'm new to cooking and baking but I've always enjoyed "fiddling around" in the kitchen and getting under my wife’s feet! She passed away this spring and now I'm into cooking full time or get REAL hungry! Friends got me into an International Cooking group and I found that I can follow a recipe pretty good. I had joined Allrecipe.com and was looking around for something to cook for a potluck and came across a recipe for "Black Olive" bread. I read through the directions and reviews a couple of times and proceeded to make my first big round loaf of bread! The amazing thing.... It tasted wonderful! The people at the potluck couldn't believe I hadn't made bread before. Sense then I've been buying all kinds of baking toys... I mean utensils. Last week I started a pineapple juice starter and looking forward to my first loaf of sourdough bread. I did try some of the discard starter in some pancake mix a couple of days ago. That was different! Just a little bit of tang to the packaged mix... I'll do that again sometime! My other hobby is woodworking but now I've got to make more choices. Do I buy a new woodworking tool, more flour, or that neat kitchen gadget??!!

Sorry for the long post and hope I don’t ask too many strange question. 

Aloha,

Royall

Just down the road from Hilo town!

PS. I read on one post about doing primitive baking on the lava from the Kilauea volcano… That’s do-able as it’s just down the road a bit!!! Interesting concept to say the least.

One of the members I have been having a chat with through the message facility here suggested to me that I introduce myself a little more formally. I have been reluctant to do so as I am still on the steep part of learning curve, but here goes.

My bread baking quest started because the multigrain bread I had enjoyed for more than 40 years is no longer available unsliced. Amazing to think that they can't profitably manage to keep some bread away from the slicer! I don't belong in the 'best thing since sliced bread' school. I like to be able to slice bread depending on how I am using it - thicker than their slices for toast and very thin for sandwiches. Over the years I have made a variety of yeast based products, but have never made all my bread as I have done over these last few months. The fact is my father was a baker as was his father and his grandfather. Until I was around 5 he baked bread in a brick oven. I can remember being taken out in the middle of the night to see the 'fairy lights' - the soot on the bricks glowed red. That was 50 years ago and the end of an era, mechanical bakeries manufacturing at much bigger scale squeezed the small local bakers out. Dad moved towns and had a very successful cake bakery but the only yeast baking he did after that, he did at home. It's wonderful to see  artisan bakeries making a go of it in recent times, even on the small island where I live there is one such bakery, though I haven't been buying any bread from them lately!

We have a supermarket, an organic food store and a couple of general stores from which I can purchase basic ingredients, but it's a trip by ferry to the city 35km away if I want to buy grains, or equipment.

I started with Peter Reinhart's WGB which I borrowed from the library, and have developed a multigrain formula which suits me based on his transitional straun. I found I preferred some white flour in the formula and much less sugar. I'm still playing with grain combinations, an infinite game.

Since I found the outstanding TFL however, thanks to everyone's generosity, I have enjoyed making quite a range of breads. I also made a sourdough starter following Debra Wink's pineapple juice method and now use white sourdough in place of the biga in the multigrain loaves. Yesterday I made the easy to make and delicious Dan Lepard Pepper Rye introduced by Jeremy and today have baked my first baguettes.

I have been fortunate enough to travel widely throughout the world and have eaten breads in all manner of circumstances, from top restaurants to the middle of the Sahara where we exchanged baguettes for water, flat bread of every description in many different countries, amazing breads baked by our camp mess crew in a metal suitcase over a fire in our Serengeti & Tarangire base camps. My best bread mouthful ever was early one morning in a tiny stand bar under the Milan Railway Station 20 years ago, I had chosen something different from my companion. He took one bite and insisted I taste his ham and cheese filled ciabatta. I've forgotten what I'd ordered, it was abandoned as I went and bought a ham & cheese ciabatta for myself. It's the mythical meal I'd like to go back for (that and some noodles eaten on a beach in Thailand!). Strange that those simple meals when no particularly delicious experience was anticipated, have proved to be such standout taste memories.

I lived in Japan for a total of 20 years, spread over three different periods (you can imagine how many wonderful meals I had there!). When I was first there bread was a white fluffy cottonwool concoction, but it wasn't long til all sorts of wonderful breads from many different countries were introduced and baked with sophistication. It was a short walk from my last apartment in Shibuya to a bakery called Levain, stunning artisan bread from 7am everyday, except for a fortnight in the summer, when they shut up shop and turned off the oven.

I posted a question in the Handbook forum; I'm hoping everybody who stores their starter in the refrigerator will drop by and tell us what maintenance and what buildup works for them. Obviously everyone will have a slightly different method but I'm hoping that we can come up with a method which will be a good base to put in the Handbook for new users of starters to commence with, before they deviate to their own preferred practice. So if you do keep your starter in the fridge please leave a note in the Handbook forum, much like taking a poll.

With kind regards and much thanks to you all,

Robyn, Waiheke Island, New Zealand

I just wanted to say hello, and mention what a great site this is (as everyone else knows). Also, the quality of content on here is superb, with more hints and recipes, etc, than I can use for a loaf of bread.

After recently travelling in France on my bicycle and eating a baguette a day, sometimes two a day, I was inspired to learn to make bread a more 'traditional' way, rather than with a bread machine. So now that I'm back in Canada, and in between jobs, I thought it would be the perfect time to start.

Below is a picture from the first dough that I have ever made at home (have worked in kitchens where dough/pastry was required). Since I don't like taking small steps and learning the basics first, I decided my first hurdle would be to make a 100% hydrated starter and use it in a Pseudo- Norwich Sourdough (thank you wildyeastblog.com). I figured I could always cover up the mistake if it didn't work (ie. throw it out), so it was worth a shot. Well, after a couple weeks of having said starter going I decided it was time for it to be used. The result being: (I know it is small, but that's because it would be easier to hide the evidence if it didn't work)

I'm fit to be criticized, so don't worry.

Hi,

Came across this web this weekend, and am enjoying it very much, so I wanted to introduce myself.

I live in SoCal (about 50 miles north of LA) and have been baking bread actively over the last 4-5 years.

My main interest has been sourdough and rye breads. I got into baking because of my grandma, who used to bake rye bread 2x per week. One of my earliest (perhaps my earliest) cooking memory is being in her kitchen, hands in a bowl of sticky rye flour "helping" her knead. The smell of her baking bread is etched forever in my memory. I started baking about 10 years ago, trying to replicate my grandma's bread, with minimal success early on.

I kept at it, researching and learning more about what makes bread work. I've always admired Nancy Silverton's breads, and started baking from her cookbook. Made Silverton's starter from grapes, and experienced joy baking crusty, deep-flavored sourdoughs.

I'm happy to say that after much research, learning, trial and error, I finally figured it out how to make my grandma's rye! It was a revelation to me, and now every time I taste the bread I'm brought back immediately to my youth.

Still doing sourdough; I was inspired to do Glezer's Columbia bread from this web site, and it turned out to be the best sourdough I've had to date. The crust of the Columbia bread is phenomenal.

What's next for me? Learning & getting more experience with soft-textured breads: hamburger buns, sticky buns, soft light sandwich breads + rolls, and other breads fluffy, airy, light interiors. Also learning more about crust, especially blistering and flakiness.

I'm really happy to have this resource, I've already learned a lot already to help improve my baking. Looking forward to sharing and learning more! Thanks Floyd!

--Cranbo