The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

New in town - My little initiation story with baking and my plans for the future

Cardo's picture
Cardo

New in town - My little initiation story with baking and my plans for the future

Hi my name is Ricardo,

I have just signed up and I'm very eager to read and learn about techniques, recipes and more regarding the beautiful and magical art of baking bread.

As my first post, I just would like to tell my story on how I started my adventure/relationship with baking. It was about two years ago, when I moved to Denmark with my wife. Being there gave me a lot free time since I had to wait for my permit in order to start even looking for a job, anyway...long story short, I started to bake following instructions from youtube videos; starting with the most simple recipe, the overnight no knead ciabatta type bread(looked like one, but I I don't think I can call it exactly that). And then... magic happened, I was very lucky I guess, since on my first try I baked an amazing, flavorful, awesome crust, crumb with beautiful big holes loaf. Since then I got hooked; I started to try different recipes, types of bread, different techniques and so on. Just now for example, I finally decided to give it a try to bake with a sourdough starter, I wasn't that lucky on my first try with that one let me tell you! But it's getting better :D

Anyway, I guess my learning process has been pretty informal, just getting recipes from webpages, forums, books, videos on youtube, etc. But I would like to get more serious about it as well as consistent with my loaves (as Hamelman puts it: "the next level of proficiency is to be able to make them consistently"), moreover because I'm planning  to open a little bakery together with my wife in my country, Mexico, but we want to offer something special and different, so we're planning on specialize on danish pastry (which we're also experimenting with and trying different recipes) as well as "European" type bread which one cannot find that often there. 

If possible I would like ask/get also some advise on the basic and necessary things to start the bakery, maybe there's some nice people that can help us figuring that out :)

Well, I'm happy to be a new member and ready to learn and try some new recipes since I just got Jeffrey Hamelman's book, which I have read on some of the posts here, is one of the best. 

I apologize in advance if sometimes I write a little funny but English is not my mother tongue and so, you can expect to see some funny-looking lines hehe.

Cheers to the TFL community, have a good bake! ;)

Lechem's picture
Lechem (not verified)

Nice to have you on board. Looking forward to swapping ideas and helping each other out in our baking quests.

My goodness... if you call that "funny" English then I don't know what good English would be. Perfect to me.

bäckerdave's picture
bäckerdave

I'm fairly new here as well, but nonetheless welcome!

That's really exciting, though!  After visiting Copenhagen, I am convinced that Danishes are the best pastries in the world. Looking forward to seeing what you make! 

And don't apologize for your English.  It's much better than a lot of native speakers.

Cardo's picture
Cardo

Thank you very much for the props! I have to agree 100% with you, danish pastries are just to die for! Cakes and all those different types of wienerbrød are something special! I think one of the key ingredients is marzipan, that makes everything delicious!  

I was telling Marybeth (Anotherloaf) about my last experiences with my newborn SD. I told her that I was trying to figure out how to use it, it´s has been only 2 weeks since I made it. On my first try the loaves didn't rise that much, but the flavor was ok. On my second I decided to use a little bit of fresh yeast, which really helped with my batch of baguettes. The last one try came up really nice; I made a batch of ciabattas following Hamelman's recipe, the one with poolish (which I made using my SD as a base). I might write a post asking about how to know the effectiveness of a SD, I'm sure there's already some talks about it on the forum, so I'm gonna look for it...probably I gave up to fast on it, I would really like to be able to make bread only with wild yeast...I'll have to try. 

So...I'll be posting soon about this...thanks again for the welcome guys! ;) 

Have a nice bake!