Floydm's blog

Today I baked the baguettes with Pâte Fermenté and the Roasted Potato Bread from Hamelman's Bread book. The potato loaves are the round ones with the fendu style crease. I love how Hamelman gives advice on how one should shape hundreds of fendu style loaves, but very little advice for the home baker. Typical of him: great recipes, but he rarely bothers helping out the novices.

We had the buttermilk rolls on the Thanksgiving table. They were wonderful. I'm trying to finish our can of coffee as quickly as I can so that I can use it to try baking a Panettone. In the meantime, I'll probably bake another batch or two of stollen and some of my family's Christmas cookies. We going to visit family in Texas in a couple of weeks. Supposedly Texas is where fruit cake originated.

Banana Bread, Struan Bread, and Rustic Bread. The banana bread was plain and simple, not even with nuts or chocolate chips.

I baked pitas for lunch today. They were great. I did 1/2 cup of the flour whole wheat, which is 1/6th of the total flour in the recipe. That is just about right for my taste. Making them fit very nicely into my morning schedule: had breakfast, prepared the dough, ran errands while it rose, came home 11:15ish and shaped and baked them. Simple, cheap, and totally rewarding.

I forgot to mention that when I made the Couronne this weekend I found myself without a poolish, something I rarely forget to do. I decided to start one at 8 AM. I used 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup water, and 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast, which is a bit more yeast than I'd do in an overnight pre-ferment.

I tried baking a Couronne this weekend: The bad news: the dough was too slack for me to shape very well, so it didn't turn out terribly pretty. The good news: the slack dough made wonderful bread. Even with a quarter of the flour whole wheat, it was light and airy. We gobbled it up. The recipe was roughly the rustic bread I've baked many times.

Firefox users: click here if you want to download a Fresh Loaf search plug-in. On that page, you click on the title "The Fresh Loaf". It'll install a little search plug-in. Then you can go up to your search box and click on the logo to switch engines. The Fresh Loaf icon looks like this: The Fresh Loaf search always at your finger tips... what more could you ask for?!?

I made Melon bread for the first time today using the recipe posted by minako. We loved them. I followed her directions with only I few adjustments. One adjustment I made was to put no egg in the bread dough and 1 whole egg in the cookie dough. I also didn't happen to have any pastry flour in the house, which I assume is what she meant by "soft flour", so I used all-purpose unbleached flour in both doughs. Here are the doughs when they were ready to shape.

I baked oodles of quick breads today. Pumpkin bread, scones, popovers, and this weird potato-apple pancake from Country Breads of the World, which I recently got from the library. A good book it seems so far. They all turned out well. The pancake kinda fell apart because I didn't use enough flour, but it tasted excellent.

I baked a pumpkin french bread this weekend:

Pumpkin French Bread Makes 2 loaves Poolish: 8 oz. water 8 oz. all-purpose unbleached flour 1/8 teaspoon instant yeast Final dough: All of the poolish 16 oz. all-purpose unbleached flour 4 oz. pumpkin puree 4 oz. water 1 teaspoon instant yeast 1 tablespoon brown sugar

At least I think that is right.