Blog posts

Pain au Levain with Red Fife 75% Sifted

I know.....It's really reckless of me to blog about my miiiiiles-away-from-perfect-looking baguette soon after Jay (Longhorn)'s wonderful report on SFBI course with the picture of his great looking baguettes.  But I'd already finished writing this up last night and  didn't know he'd do such a thing while I was sleeping..... Oh well......:p

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I’m coming up on my first anniversary.  It was late August last year when I first baked something like bread and wrote something like a blog post about it. 

In response to a thread, I thought I'd start a thread with simple sourdough recipes for beginning sourdough bakers.

The idea is that the recipes are:

• use steps that build upon well-established baking techniques
• forgiving enough if starter hydration is not exactly 100%
• use common ingredients (that you can find at any supermarket)
• use a minimum of ingredients (no more than 7)

The recipe does assume that you have a healthy starter which:

One year ago David Snyder began his Day 1 blog entry with "Wow! There is no possible way to descirbe today in full..." and I agree! Reading David's blogs and looking at David's photos of his own breads convinced me that I would benefit from this class...so.. one year later I am taking my turn at the SFBI experience. David wrote a great summary last year and I will refer you to his blog for what is almost certainly a more thorough coverage of the class than I will provide. But I will stive to explore what I find most insightful and different from David.

Beer and bread has always seemed like a logical combination to me and I have made several variations on beer bread. This version is based on an American Rye Ale and uses only beer for hydration.

The French Broad Brewery is just down the road and I am lucky enough to have a friend who works there. Not a bad deal, trading beer for bread.

Ingredients:

Levain:

100% hydration fed with KA Bread flour – 300g

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

Click here for my blog index.

I've finally caught up with writing these recipes and posting them on my blog. The format and style of writing is still a work in progress but I hope that they will be of value to other bakers. There are no claims of authenticity, only an admission of shameless lifting from other formula or recipes posted here on TFL or on the internet.

http://chaosamongstthefloursandflowers.blogspot.com/2011/08/sourdough-anadama-bread-recipe.html

Hello,
While visiting Victoria last March, I picked up a book called My sweet Mexico, written by Fany Gerson.
This book is full of all sorts of lovely things, and as I was looking through the book a few days ago, came across a recipe for Alegrias (Amaranth “Happiness” Candy).
The ingredients listed pecans, peanuts, raisins, pumpkin seeds, piloncillo sugar, honey, a bit of lemon (or lime) juice,
and puffed amaranth seeds.

We have my sister and brother-in-law and my younger son's two daughters staying with us this week. This morning, we had a traditional Sunday brunch with bagels, smoked salmon, farmers' chop suey and sourcream coffee cake. My neighborhood bread tasters joined us.