Blog posts

Last week marked the return of ARTE Dubai, following a summer break in August. A week earlier, I’ve baked three breads  in 3 days. The first was Rye Sourdough with multigrain, and then a new recipe of mine: Date sesame bread, and finally the all too popular: Roasted garlic bread from Hamelman's book :BREAD. As expected, the garlic bread sold out in 3 hours,  while the date sesame came in second, and finally the Rye multigrain; the word rye multigrain may have mislead many visitors into thinking that the bread is hefty and dense , whereas it has only 20%  rye.

Any body else using a SF sourdo starter? I bought the SF started from Ed Wood at Sourdo.com.

A SF starter- to me - has the potential for a beguling sweetness lurking in the middle of a complex mmmmm.

Been making bread for about 8 months now, with good flavor and oven spring.

Acidity levels turn out more variable than I'd like, but don't gyrate wildly ...

I use a proof box (home built) to stabilize the starter temperature (I'm currently liking 73 degrees).

A no knead method is working well, and is quite simple to accomplish. No autolyese (yet).

So I was browsing through one of my books looking for something new to make and the Tomato Sourdough looked interesting.  I'd seen it before along with a beetroot sourdough but always glossed over them thinking them to be somewhat quirky and simply strange for the sake of being strange.  How wrong was I ?!

Been baking from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt & Yeast, and I decided it was time to keep better notes of what I was doing so that I know how to consistently get the bread I love.  

Let me start off for the record saying that while this bread is fantastic, I won't be following these procedures again, unless I can't get an equally great bread doing things correctly...

My friend's birthday is tomorrow, so I figured I should bake something that I knew would turn out well, and that I had some experience with. The Tartine basic country loaf seemed perfect. So I baked.

So life got busy, it got hot outside, and I got lazy about updating. Here's the last several weeks, roughly condensed into one blog post.

12 September, 2014

 One of the attractions of Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast bread baking book is that a concerted study of it will teach you how the important variables of ingredients, time and temperature can be manipulated to produce different flavor profiles and how, keeping most methods constant, you can develop procedures that accommodate to your own schedule and still produce a variety of outstanding breads.

Back in the UK, and it's great to be baking again.

I was pleased with the crumb on the classic sourdough I made today.  My husband liked the crust as well.

I just couldn't help myself. I really wanted to bake, so I decided to make some no-knead bread; something that would be doable during a school day, even if it meant using commercial yeast. I must say, I was quite happy with the results, and it made a delicious loaf to have for dinner. 

We were out of town for a few days and came back to a 100 year floods.  The normal rout we take to our house was closed so we had to go around and come in the back way.  The reason the road was flooded was the 5’ of rain we got in one day when we only get 7” a year.