Isand66's blog

 I love nuts....some say I am nuts....well, I'll leave that up to you to decide but I think my wife has already made up her mind :).

Tangzhong is the technique of heating a portion of the flour and liquid in your recipe to approximately 65C to make a paste (roux).

While traveling for business the last two weeks in China, as usual I read my favorite website, www.thefreshloaf.com and couldn't wait to get home to try some new recipes.  One of the recipes I loved was Varda's Pugliese Revisited.    The

After returning from the first ever TFL gathering in Lexington MA last weekend I wanted to use some the rye starter that Varda gave me to make a rye bread.  Dave Snyder posted his latest bake of the above bread on The Fresh Loaf this past week and pushed me over the edge to try it myself.  You can find the recipe at his original post

  After returning from a great weekend at the first ever The Fresh Loaf get together just outside of Boston I ended up with some left over starters that I had brought with me.  I decided to use most of the corn flour/AP starter along with some AP starter to make my next bread.

I haven't made bread with my Yeast Water starter in a while so I figured I would try making a YW levain using my proofer set at 86 degrees F. and see how it came out.  I was hoping the proofer would allow the YW levain to develop better than it usually does and it did not disappoint.  The levain was made in 2 builds with the first one lasting 7 hours and the second about 4 hours.

     As I mentioned in my previous post I recently purchased a Brod and Taylor proofer and I have been experimenting with it to see how it affects the sourness and overall bread.

My friend Eric was stopping by to go to lunch yesterday so I told him I would bake bread for him to take home.  He requested something simple and plain.  I don't do simple and plain...it's just not part of my DNA, so what I came up with is as close as it gets!

Earlier in the week I attempted to make a bread using a raspberry dessert wine and I didn't take my own advice and used too much wine in the bake.  It did not develop properly and the final bread ended up gummy and is now food for my compost pile.

My wife is not a big fan of my multi-grain breads and I'm always getting on her for not trying more of my breads.  For this reason I agreed to make her an English Muffin bread, which was simple and plain.  Well you know by now if you follow my posts that I don't know the meaning of the word simple so here is as close as I could bring myself to make a simple English Muffin style bread.