dolfs's blog

L'shanah tovah

Today I baked a traditional (i.e. round) Challah for the new year's celebration.

Round Holiday ChallahRound Holiday Challah

Certainly not my best ever, but it'll do!

--dolf

Leader's: Pain au levain, and Auvergne Rye Baguette with pancetta

I got the book last week, so today, my regular baking day, I wanted to make some. As luck would have it, after having started baking in April, I had finally decided to create a sourdough starter, but had to delay until recently due to my vacation. Last week I started creating Maggie Glezer's firm french style starter (as well as a whole wheat and rye version). The composition of that starter is identical to Leader's stiff levain (although the feeding formula is slightly different), so I used this in the recipe.

Reinhart's Ciabatta

Today we're having a party and I figured (yesterday), I'd make some ciabatta. I never made it before and decided to make Reinhart's (BBA) recipe based on biga. I did scale it up a little to make slightly more. In the process of doing the calculations, I think I discovered some errors in the percentages and corrected them. I made the bread using the corrected recipe (I'll post on that seperately).

Reinhart's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

Received the book finally 2 days ago. I had pre-ordered from Amazon and they kept claiming it wouldn't ship to me until October. I complained with customer service as others were receiving it, and when I placed a new order, it said it would ship immediately (I cancelled that one of course). That caused them to send it right away.Reinhart's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

Reinhart's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread 

Memorial Day Hamburger Buns

Today we had a large barbeque party with our various neighbors and their children and dogs (it was our dog's 10th birthday). So, I just had to make Hamburger buns and hot dog rolls.

Hamburger BunsHamburger Buns

On Friday, when my other baking was going on, I did a quick trial run with Hamelman's recipe. They were OK, but for the production run I made two changes:

Spinach Cheese Boule with Whole Wheat

Many a Sunday my wife and son buy a boule at the local farmer's market which they call Spinach Cheese Bread, even though it has lots of other veggie stuff in it too. They like it, so for last week's baking session I decided to try and make my own.