Blog posts

I recognized late last fall that my friends and family love receiving yeast breads on special occasions. 

This realization lead me to begin experimenting with fruit, nuts, chocolate, and sweeter-associated spices in my breads. I've tried a pretty expansive range of slightly sweet loaves, from molasses, to cinnamon-brown sugar, to a "sourdough take on fruitcake (with bourbon!)."

I hope everyone's new year is off to a great start.

Winter weather has lead to winter colds, which unfortunately reduces the sensitivity of my already not terribly refined palate, but I have been baking when I can.  Two of my recent efforts are worth mentioning.

Above and below are pictures of my recent attempts to make something like the Mazowiecka loaf that a local Polish bakery makes.  It has a bit of rye, a tightish crumb, and a sweet, malt-y flavour.

Happy New Year All!

For Christmas I received a copy of Forkish's "Flour Water Salt Yeast".  This weekend I baked a loaf of the Field Grain #2.  I followed formula and timings pretty much right on.  I haven't cut the loaf yet so no crumb shot.  However despite being a fairly high hydration loaf, it was not too bad to work with.  I am very satisfied with the baked product.

I Learned a lot from Tartine- so much, but I think I need a little departure, a little space from Chad.

Today I learned by taste what I started to suspect. Bump the starter, use more starter.

This loaf is 700 grams starter And 900 grams flour (500 bread flour and 400 all purpose) tastes great, tastes killer. 70% hydration. 

Bread-baking has fully converted me to the metric system, but it hasn't yet convinced me to suspend my impulse to experiment rather than follow recipes or formulas. For the most part! I love to read and absorb recipes, but I always seem to end up using my new-found tool of baker's percentages to invent my own loaves. 

I've really wanted to experiment with a stiff levain for a long time (biga-like strength? Yes, please!), so I decided to give it a whirl. I put together a simple formula and hoped for the best: 

Levain:

50g 100% hydration starter

75g ap fl

Ding Ding!  Round Two.

After yesterday's attempt at the 75% Saturday WW, with more hoped for, I thought I'd give the Saturday White Bread a try.

 Water temperature was lowered to 73.8F in the hope of achieving the desired final mix temp of 77-78F.

Final mix temperature 81.9F.

Bulk fermentation time 3hrs 35mins.

Proofing 30mins.

Baking; 30mins covered, 20mins uncovered @ 475F

I'm embarassed to say that this is the first bread I've baked since the summer. What can I say, I've been busy. At least I've been dutifully feeding my starter!

Today I baked Pane Lariano from the formula in Daniel Leader's book Local Breads. It's 50% whole wheat. I've made the all-white flour version many times and everyone loves it. I'm happy to report that this version came out just as good and I'm sure everyone will love it as much as the other. 

I did a lot of baking recently, but wasn't able to post very much as we had family visiting.  They left today to return to the snowy midwest, so I will get back to a normal baking schedule.  We did have a wonderful time over the holidays, and I will miss them.

My niece loves sourdough, so I made quite a bit of bread during their visit.

With the new office job, I find myself making more pan breads, perfect for a sandwich to take to the office.  I have tried many a recipe, ended up building from my Vienna Bread recipe's formula, replacing ingredients, and tweaking percentages around.  I finally landed on this bread, exactly what I wanted in a brown bread.  This bread makes for great sandwich bread, toasted and dipped in runny eggs in the morning, made into toast points for spreads, and with cheeses for mid-day snack on the weekends.  The use of a yeast instead of sourdough, along with all of the whole gr

I am new to bread baking having done most of my baking in the cake arena.  Anyway, after a trip to Montreal and tasting the finest bread to have ever touched my palette from one of the local boulangeries, (the bread put my sandwich filing to shame!) I have chosen to set out on the oft trodden path of trying to bake some myself.  I  purchased a few books by some of the usual suspects mentioned on this site and decided to give the Forkish Saturday 75% Whole Wheat Bread a go.