pmccool's blog

Lots of decorating throughout the house, plus some stollen for when family visit for the holiday.  Maybe some for gifting, too.  Fortunately, the white stuff hasn't shown up outdoors, yet.  

Paul

Since receiving my copy of The Rye Baker, I've been baking and savoring its breads on a virtual basis.  It is a beautiful book with many intriguing breads to try; far more than I sampled during the test bakes.  Good as all that has been, the time has come to do some real baking.  Actually, the time came last weekend but I hadn't made the necessary preparations, so I ran out of weekend before getting to bake anything from the book.  Consequently, I made sure to have everything on hand and my schedule laid out so as to get serious about baking this weekend.

Back in March, Stan (elagins) posted about a Lithuanian black rye bread that he had made.  It looked absolutely lovely and worthy of a bake.  However, my baking over the past three months has gone in other directions.  Worse, I've taken about as much bread out of my freezer as I have out of my oven.  It's a wonderful tool, the freezer, but baking is much more satisfying than thawing.

Hey, it's a baking site; enough with the sniggering already.

So I had this post about half-written and managed to blow it away with an ill-placed click of the mouse.  Since I don't feel like recreating it, this will be the condensed version.

It's warm enough for grilling and smoking to begin in earnest.  That means buns are coming to the fore again.

Although it was supposed to have been...

While in South Africa this past December, we had the chance to spend a few days in the Stellenbosch area; not far from Cape Town and in the middle of South Africa's winelands.  Stellenbosch is a picturesque town in its own right, replete with many examples of the Cape Dutch arhictectural style.  It is surrounded by vineyards and mountains and olive groves and lavender fields and is so beautiful as to make the flatlander tourist gape in wonder.  You could, for instance, have lunch or dinner at a vineyard's restaurant and enjoy scenery like this:

Weekends, the times that I do most of my baking, have been rather full of late.  There have been seminars to attend, a class to teach, a grandson's out-of-state (for us, not him) cross country meet to attend and all of the other "normal" stuff that makes up life.  Still, I've found ways to weave in some baking with the other things going on.  Posting here on TFL has taken a bit of a back seat to the other activities, though.

We recently enjoyed a marvelous cruise from Vancouver (didn't get the opportunity to say hi to Floyd) up through the Inside Passage of Alaska.  We had port calls at Ketchikan, Juneau (emphasis on the 'eau', with 320 days of rain a year), and Skagway.  From there we sailed to Glacier Bay and spent a day marveling at the immensity and beauty of several glaciers.  Then it was on to our debarkation at Seward.  From Seward, we opted for the train excursion to Anchorage, then another train excursion to Denali, then a coach excursion to Fairbanks, and our flight home.

I received a note recently from Amy Goldman, who had attended one of my sourdough classes.  She and her partner, Sean Galloway, are in the process of planning a business combining a brewery and bakery in the KC area.  Right now they plan to call it The Brewkery.  Amy is already baking, using starter that I provided to each of the students.  It's a treat to think that my starter might be the base for a bakery's sourdough breads someday.

Paul

I've been interested for some time in playing around with durum flour.  Between finding only the coarser semolina grind locally and being put off by the costs of mail ordering, I hadn't taken the plunge before now.  However, totally by serendipity, I happened to be in an IndoPak grocery store recently and they had a whole shelf section of various atta flours, most milled from durum wheat.  A 20-pound bag (only $12.99) followed me home and has been silently taunting me these past two weeks as other things kept me from baking.