This past week Randy came up from Missoula, MT to help us out at the bakery. It was a very busy week as we had plenty of special orders plus the usual wholesale and farmers' market work to do. Fortunately we had perfect weather for both farmers' markets and we had lots of happy customers at both of them. On Saturday we had quite the customer demand as Sharon and I quickly filled the orders and Randy worked his butt off to keep the shelves filled with bread and the display cases stocked with pastries (sound familiar Thomas?). If you haven't experienced it yet, it's a
As I blogged a few days ago, the first trial with T55 didn’t turn out as I had planned.
Here is a boule I made last weekend that is worth sharing. I had replenished my starter but didn't have enough bread flour on hand to make up my usual dough. I knew if I made a trip to the store, by the time I came back, my starter would be past its peak, so I just made up the difference with the flours I had on hand.
I really liked the flavour of this loaf and it improved throughout the week. Here is the recipe:
Pain au Levain from Hamelman's Bread (So what if I baked it umpteen weeks in a row? It's really good!)
Pain au Levain Crumb (the real reason I'm posting on this bread again)
They say "Man cannot live by bread alone. You need side dishes."
Reel 
Bay
Gulls
So, this is the first report on my trial of T55 flour my daughter brought back from Paris. I used to use Shipton’s T55 years ago for a while, but this is the first time I’ve ever used T55 actually made in France….though it’s just a supermarket’s own brand flour, so definitely not the highest quality one. But to be fair, the supermarket my daughter bought it from was Monoprix, which, according to Wiki, is “considered an up-scale chain and its business model was the inspiration for Waitrose,” in spite of its very un-assuring name :p, so hopefully it’s
today second day of makeing focaccia bread , made two kinds one with house made oven dried tomatos , basil , galrlic
and a second with lemon zest , thime , cooked shallot and garlic.
problem the tomato did not cook the same , as the lemon thime , and my salt was off on the tomato ,
i baked both at 375 convection , rotated twice , i have a anouther batch tomrow im gonna try zookini
advic0e on cooking time and racio to salt per pound of plour i used AP and i used one week old starter .
amd fillterd H2O
Today was the final day of Artisan I. We made four baguette doughs: a hand mix, and three doughs with preferments - poolish, sponge, and prefermented dough. The week of dough handling clearly showed. Our shaping and scoring were much improved as the photos will illustrate. The hand mix was very similar to the short mix done in the spiral mixer on day 2. Our prefermented doughs were a little less acid than usual and this was attributed to the fact that the temperature overnight was 5 to 6 degrees cooler than normal.
