Blog posts

I am still extremely new to this forum, as well as to bread baking in general.  I am enjoying reading all of your posts, and appreciate greatly the opportunity to learn from your successes and/or tribulations.  I am sticking with straight doughs for now, and working them only by hand, in the hope that I will develop my feel for the dough. 

For these loaves, I used the following recipe:

400g KA Bread Flour

200g Semolina Flour

12g SAF instant yeast

1T Diastatic Malt Powder

2t Salt, dissolved in

420g water at 125 degrees

You know what they say... Life is a journey. But have you ever been pulled down a path that you otherwise would have walked on by? That's what happened to me when I started playing with sourdough. I didn't even like sourdough, or so I thought until about seven and a half years ago. I was watching the food network one day, and Daniel Leader appeared as a guest on Cooking Live. He was demonstrating how to make a sourdough starter from nothing but flour and water. How fascinating! I had no idea you could do that.

Some time ago, Pat (proth5) posted her formula for baguettes. This was in the context of our "great baguette quest" of some months back. We were playing with higher hydration doughs and cold fermentation à la Gosselin and Bouabsa.

Pat's formula is levain-based and employs a 65% hydration dough. She has insisted repeatedly that, while higher hydration is one route to a more open, holey crumb, fermentation and technique in shaping the baguettes are at least as important and that good technique can achieve the desired open crumb even with a dryer dough.

It is still cold here so I made a big pot of black bean soup this evening.   I also made whole wheat rolls with organic stone ground whole wheat flour that grown and milled by flourgirl51.

I've been asked (via Messages!!) to post the recipe I used for Pitas.  I made two recipes, but I'll post the one that was designed as a Pita recipe.  Apparently just about any bread recipe will work, although I don't know about high-hydration doughs.

In my experimenting, I've become curious about the role of the yeast.  My conjecture is that the yeast just helps with the development of the gluten and of the formation of a gluten skin (as I think someone called it).  I don't think it has much of any role in the puffing up.

Last night I made two loaves of Honey Wheat Bread that I found on Allrecipes.com - it is really good, although it didn't rise quiet like I'd hoped. That said, it's still very good. I went "simple" for dinner tonight and made Tuna Melts on the bread I made yesterday...mmm, yummy! I need to get my camera working so I can take some pictures. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more, and sharing with you all. This site looks great - I'm glad I came across it.

This is a very basic simple recipe that came with my Bell La Cloche...recipe by Chuck Williams of Williams-Sonoma. 

This is a straight dough...1 pkg. ady, 1 tsp. sugar, 1-3/4 c. warm water '110' degrees F., 5 cups hard wheat unbleached flour or All-Purpose flour, 3/4 tsp. salt. 

Sylvia 

My husband is out with his bike cycling team today and Im doing my favorite thing 'baking' of coarse!

Megapretzels, sunflowerbread and carrot-almond bread