A few of my Country Loaves I baked this morning.

(music starts) "Daddy's Little Baby Loves Sour-dough Sour-dough;

Daddy's Little Baby Loves Sour-dough Bread" (music ends).

JonnyP

Hi all!

I've had the craving for baking some bread for days now, but unfortunately had a cold and wasn't feeling up to much of anything apart from sitting on the sofa with some Lemsip and a DVR full of bad telly.

Anyhoo, I'm in much better condition today, and currently have 1KG of dough proofing.  Meanwhile, I thought I'd share the pics of the work in progress.

Rediscovering Waldkorn bread this week. I can only take credit for mixing it all up and shaping it as tight as I managed this time around; I'm using a "soezie mix". I'm trying to break down what is in there to make it THAT dark a loaf. Any help in deconstructing is appreciated. And no, alas, the flour formula is not on the bag... Crumb pics to come when the loaf has cooled down enough (after seriously ripping a beautiful bread to pieces I have found the patience to properly cool at last)

My bananas were turning on me, so I decided on a banana bread. with toasted almonds, walnuts, vanilla, cinnamon and a lemon zinged icing. If anyone is interested in the entire recipe, give me a shout. I'll post some crumb pics of this one later as well. The banana bread was baked on the waldkorns residu heat; I'm not wasting my oven heat any more after getting in this year's gas bill...

happy baking every one, greetz from Amsterdam

Freerk

After lurking for a year I've decided to share what I've been up to.

Five Grain Levain

Vermont Sourdough

Pizza

Baguette a l'Ancienne using Don's recipe and Sylvia's wet towel steaming method

I was fairly pleased with La Grigne and the scoring

I do pastry too :)

Today I had my first "success" with my sourdough.....instead of baking some kind of primitive building material, I actually made a loaf!!  I think it's pretty decent, but would like to improve upon a few things.  One, the crust is nearly burnt, despite my having to take this bread out of the oven "early" (before the recipe said it would be finished).  The crust on the bottom and lower sides of the loaf is quite nice and brown, but the top is more black.  Did I cause this by spraying water directly onto the top of my loaf during the first 5 min. of baking?  I have a convection oven, but turned the convection fan off, due to the recommendation in Reinhardt's book "Crust and Crumb".  Perhaps if I'd kept the fan on, the color would have been more even?

Also, the interior is lacking in "holes".  It is nice and chewy and has an acceptable flavor, but I'd like to see those nice big, irregular holes.  This dough did seem stiffer than the recipes I've made in the past....it seemed more like a "normal" yeasted bread dough to me....perhaps that is to account for the lack of "open crumb" (is that what you call it??).  If I made the dough slightly stickier next time, do you think I would get more holes?

FYI, I have been using Nancy Silverton's "Breads of La Bread Bakery" book and using 100% moisture/flour starter.  I made her beginner's sourdough recipe.

Any tips for this beginner would be much appreciated!!

~Katie

Matthew Boyer has sent Rose an email with photos documenting all the breads he made while baking his way through The Bread Bible. Take a look:

http://www.realbakingwithrose.com/2010/08/the_complete_bread_bible_inclu.html

The couple of folks who actually read my posts may have noticed that I seem to be posting at crazy hours.

I've been working in the Ryukyu (or Okinawa) and although beginning to suffer from baking withdrawal have been absolutely blown away by the beautiful breads in the nearby department store.  Unfortunately, to a Western palate, many of these breads are tasteless - but they sure are beautiful.

I finally bribed a colleague who has both a camera and photography skills to take pictures.

 Here is a shot of a "simple" pain de mie that seems to have been laminated and twisted in some way to produce a wide open, fluffy crumb and a parquet style crust.  If anyone out  there knows precisely how this is done - I would love to know.

These pastries reminded me of my days at the Back Home Bakery (Was that even in this same lifetime?). That is if we had put our inner pastry chefs on steroids.

These sweet little pussy cat buns are almost too cute to eat.  You just want to pinch their little cheeks.

These chocolate breads are an enriched bun only very lightly flavored with chocolate (again, beautiful, but not much flavor.)  The lighter flecks are sweet crispy peanutty things.

That layer on top that looks like extra chocolately goodness is actually just an egg wash.

 There are many more, but we were becoming an embarrassment by acting like insane tourists.  I really wanted to ask if I could spend a week being free labor in the bakery, but my limited Japanese language skills stood in the way.  I tried my normal means of communication (pointing, smiling, and nodding...) to no avail.

I also had the chance to visit a store with a baking factory in the back.  Even on the street we could catch an unusually delicious buttery aroma.  The factory was dedicated to baking little boat shaped tarts filled with purple sweet potato filling.

This machine took a large chunk of pastry dough and measured it out into the tart molds, then tamped it down.

You can see the finished tart shells exiting the machine in the next picture.

This one squirted in the sweet potato filling and it was a hoot to watch it make the little curlicues.

 Then the pastries were baked and a machine delicately lifted them onto a conveyor where gossamer wheels straightened them on the belt in preparation for wrapping.  They are quite delicious and no baker required!

Of course, this isn't all I've done  - but I'm trying to stay "on topic."  I will just say that I haven't had a bad meal since I got here, and as I type I'm watching the tide go out on the East China Sea.

Happy Baking!

I need a little help here.  I'm a bit more skilled in the photography dept. than in baking, so I'm having issues getting the kind of crumb I want.  I'm getting there, but I think I'm deflating my breads a bit too much before the proofing stage.  I figured the whole grain+fruit_nut bread would have a crumb like I ended up with, but the white loaf on the bottom was really only shaped and slightly keaded before proofing.  I did the whole folding technique vs. punching down and solid 10 minute kneading.  I also made a poolish that sat out overnight.  It ended up more like a ciabatta and less like a boule texture wise.  Any advice?