Hey everyone,

I just posted a new focaccia video on our website if your interested.

http://fgpizza.com/videos_cookbake.php#Focaccia

I hope you enjoy

Frankie G - FGpizza

http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=154698f919d69ec9bc1b46e4e&id=8220a92253

I'm currently on vacation and am finding myself with absolutely no adequate tools for making a loaf of bread, but I'm doing it anyway :)  I thought it would be fun to hear people's stories of making bread when they have none of their normal, or even acceptable, tools and hear about how it came out.  Please share!

I'm currently in a vacation home and have none of my normal 'old reliables'...I'm not going to buy a bunch of stuff just to make a few loaves while here, so, here's what I've done:

Ingredients, luckily, aren't a problem.  I don't have my starter, obviously, so I stopped by the grocery and picked up some KAF bread flour and a pack of instant yeast.  The water is undrinkable here so I also picked up some big jugs of drinking water.

The hardest park so far is being without a scale.  Without weight measurements and without memorized recipes based on volume measurements, it's been more difficult than I thought to do a bunch of conversions from measure to weight to figure out a bakers percentage.  I didn't try very hard to find a 'by volume' recipe, so it was a bit harder than it needed to be.

After googling some cups -> weight or tbs->weight conversions, I got something I thought was close.  From there, I relied on my hands to tell me when the hydration was right.

I had no bowls so I mixed and fermented my dough in a casserole dish which worked ok.  Without a baking stone, I plan on baking on a cookie sheet with a second sheet preheaded in the oven to hold the steam-creating ice cubes.  

There's nothing within 50 miles, apparently, sharp enough to score the bread without tearing it, so I found a pair of office scissors (which I washed thoroughly) and plan on making my cuts using that...we'll see.

As you can hear I'm not finished....I'm currently proofing and am about to put it in the oven.  We'll see! 

In the end, even handmade bad bread is delicious bread...so it can only go so wrong. :)  Share you're stories about your most makeshift loaf...I'd love to hear them!

I don't own a Danish dough whisk but I do own a flat whisk--a tool designed for sauce making. I've found that it not only does a great job of whisking the fond (the brownish bits at the bottom of the sauce pan) and incorporating all the elements of a sauce, it is a splendid bread mixing tool. This versatile tool is strong enough to mix the dough and starter (it does a great job getting into the corners of my smallish SD container). And, because it's made of stainless steel wire, is super easy to clean.

The one I have is made by Rosle (an excellent if spendier brand). I see that the Fantes site has both flat and Danish bread whisks for about the same price (but does the Danish whisks serve the dual purpose the sauce whisk does?).

I'd be interested in hearing from people who have both tools, to see if there is some significant advantage of one over another.

Flat whisk:

Danish dough whisk:

I have relocated my Bread Baker's Toolbox (Volume Conversion Formula Tool , Custom Batch Formula Tool) to one of my hosting servers at BreadMagic.com. Now I can finally shut down my server at the house. I hope you can get some use out of these tools and I will be making more of them soon. If you have any suggestions for formula or conversion tools that would make your life easier, just let me know.

As promised, I have added another tool to my "Bread Baker's Toolbox" for anyone to use. I call this one "The Custom Batch Formula Tool". You use this one when you have a bread formula with the ingredient quantities already specified by weight and you want to create a custom batch size. The software does the math, calculating the Baker's Percentages and displaying the results for your custom batch in both grams and ounces (US). I chose these units because they are the most common used in bread formulas by the home baker. Some large batch formulas will use pound (lbs.) and fractions of pounds. This is simple enough to solve; If you want a custom batch for 5  pounds so you can have 5 one pound loaves, just multiply 5 x 16 to determine total ounces for your custom batch. Anyway, I've put this tool through the paces...its very fast and accurate. Sometimes the final dough weight will equal 699 ounces when you specified 700...this is because each ingredient is rounded to 1/100 of and ounce or 1/100 of a gram. (you don't want to work with numbers that look like this: 234.34453040304004). Give it a try and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for improvements. Trust me, I can take the critical comments. As a software developer, I know that the product is never good enough for everybody and I can live with that....I just do my best:) Go to breadmagic.com and follow the link. You can now choose between the Volume Conversion Formula  Tool and this new Custom Batch Formula Tool.