Hello all!  I am rather new here too.  I joined a couple months ago, and then lost the link.  But now I have it saved so I can visit regularly.

 I love to bake, especially breads, and with the weather getting cooler here, it has really motivated me to get the oven going.  I bake all of our breads (normal every day bread) but I also like to experiment with other things, make up recipes and such.  I look forward to participating here and learning from others with more experience in the bread world.

I thought i should introduce myself....as i just recently joined and saw the intro part of the forum. i live in north texas (born in ny and grew up in cleveland oh) and i have been baking bread off and on for 35 years.....(hate to admit to that....) since i was 16.....mostly challot as i'm jewish, but i've also done a sprouted wheatberry which is quite tasty. i'm interested in getting the 'secrets of rye breads...' as i really have a desire to bake the ultimate 'jewish rye' given my backgroud i've tasted some killer ryes at various delis and would love to replicate this for my family.  i also am into whole grain baking and i wonder if it is posible to make a jewish rye that also has whole wheat....would this be pumpernickel? i have recently aquired the reinhart whole grains book, local breads, maggie glezer's book a blessing of breads, and la brea bakery...i've owned laurel's bread book for many years.  i made a whole wheat rye bread from laurel's bread book which tasted good but did not rise AT ALL.  i have 3 differeint starters going, one from reinhart, glazer, and la brea.  i had done a starter from laurel's book the rye starter only to realize after reading on the site and other places that a starter that had any amount of conventional yeast is not a true starter. so i pitched it and started over. the site is fantastic, so much knowledge and so little time to read! i have much to learn and am looking forward to this.....

deborah 

Hello! Just found your site this morning and have been reading it ever since :) Made the lovely quick ciabatta bread and am eating it now. Hope to have many more happy endings from all the wonderful recipes, the page is great!

I've been wanting to start baking our bread for some time now and once I found this site I knew it was that time.  I'm a stay at home mom living in Iowa with a 9 month old daughter.  I'm making a variation on French bread as I type this...first rise is going well and if it tastes good I'll probably post the recipe.

I hope I learn a lot while I'm here!

hello everyone!

i've been lurking around here for a few months learning a ton and drooling over some beautiful loaves.

my bf and i have this crazy idea that we're going to open a little vegan bakery. so when i'm not working the day job, i'm trying to practice as much as i can. it's hard to schedule the time, but last weekend i did manage to bust out 6 loaves of bread on saturday, including sourdough. i'll post about those in the appropriate places but i'm really happy with how they came out!

other than the time to actually bake, my biggest battle is against my stupid oven. it's almost impossible to keep it at a steady temperature. it'll hold at one temp and then randomly shoot up 50-75 degrees. so i have to watch it like a hawk and sometimes have trouble with the bottoms of my breads getting a little extra done.

this past week was also spent playing with laminated dough. so here's a question: how do you keep from packing on the pounds when testing recipes? i'm giving lots of stuff away, but too much is still going in my pie hole. i don't know whether that's a :-) or a :-(

laura

Now that I've made my inaugural post, I thought I'd introduce myself.

I live in Michigan and have made bread off and on for most of my adult life, although not always good bread. A couple of years ago, I got interested in making artisan and/or sourdough breads and tried making my starter from scratch. Most of my resulting bread wasn't very good because I didn't understand about hydration and wetter doughs. Thanks to this site and a few others, that has changed.

A couple of months ago (January? February?) I got ticked off that the expensive sourdough I was buying kept molding in 4 or 5 days (yeah, I know bread doesn't stay fresh that long, but we're a small family) and started googling how to make bread again. I wandered off and my husband stumbled on the New York Times No Knead Bread recipe. I thought it was some kind of hoax, but obsesive research showed otherwise and I made my first loaf.

All was well and we were pretty happy with the NKB, but I wanted sourdough! I found this site and Mike Avery's site and orderd Carl's Oregon Trail starter. I got it a couple of days before Memorial Day Weekend and have been nurturing it ever since. I try to make a loaf of bread and sourdough pancakes every weekend now.

Also, we're eating dairy and egg free due to my son's allergies and the sourdough pancakes beat the pants off the rice milk ones I was making. I use an egg replacer from the HFS and prior to the sourdough, we got gummy, half passable pancakes. My husband stopped asking for them on the weekend. Now we get tangy, tasty pancakes that are a joy to eat.

Hi. Just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Lisa and I am an American living in Germany. I have been here almost 8 years now. I am mother to 6 wonderful (sometimes) children and work part time as a waitress. I have always loved to cook, but go in phases. Sometimes it is the same old/same old and then I get tired of that and go on a binge of trying new recipes. My newest interest is baking bread. Although we can buy wonderful breads on every street corner here, i am still interested in learning to bake for myself.

Lisa

hi, I'm FlamesDancing. I've come around here a few times, haven't been lurking long, but when I got into trouble with my starter, I htought I'd become more than just a lurker. lol so yeah.

Hello everyone, I am very happy to be part of this group. I'm a panadera (baker) and I live in the Philippines. I am interested in all food--related things, including cooking and food science but my passion is in bread making. I look forward to sharing ideas and recipes with everyone.

I ran across your site when I did a search on shortbread cookies, a fatal weakness.

I think baking is a pretty cool thing and your site looks really good. In fact, I am heading to my local library later to pick up a copy of The Bread Bakers Apprentice since it was mentioned here.

One of my prize posessions is a dog-eared copy of Uncle John's Bread Book which has wonderful recipes and advice in it. For instance, I learned that dusting a pizza peel with a light coating of corn meal (so it can slide around) is "applying in the Presbyterian manner." The things you learn :-)

I grew up near a Polish bakery and you could smell the fresh bread on Sundays and one of the lasting memories from my youth is going down there to pick up a fresh loaf of rye bread for a quarter. I would break off the heel piece and crunch away.

I have made some breads and pies and am ready to move on to the next step of actually having them improve, not just show that I did it. I especially like baking my own pizzas and I use one of the Uncle John recipes for French bread for the crust. Makes for an interesting combination.

At any rate, glad to be aboard as I go through the site. I will be especially intersted in the forums and the recipes and the advice. The part about steaming was interesting and it led to a call to GE (which makes my oven, the gas Profile) which told me I could put a pan of water in there for steam. Thank goodness, along with my quarry tiles from Lowe's, I'm hot to trot.