Blog posts

Many years ago I was in Hang-chow, China, 200 km south west of Shanghai, visiting their Tea Museum.  The museum is set in the beautiful West Lake where historically poets and artists gathered.  I bought a cookbook incorporating tea in dishes at the museum.  I thought at the time the idea was really clever, and why not, Oolong tea (a type of green tea) is so good for us.  Other than that, there's not much to speak of about the book, which is in its typical Chinese crude way of presenting cuisine.   

As promised, I have added another tool to my "Bread Baker's Toolbox" for anyone to use. I call this one "The Custom Batch Formula Tool". You use this one when you have a bread formula with the ingredient quantities already specified by weight and you want to create a custom batch size. The software does the math, calculating the Baker's Percentages and displaying the results for your custom batch in both grams and ounces (US). I chose these units because they are the most common used in bread formulas by the home baker.

California seems to have an abundance of fresh cherries in the markets right now. Since fresh cherry pie is one of my favorites, I just haven't been able to resist the urge to work on my recipe.

I assembled the pie dough first using the Vodka crust recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It was easy to work with. I thought the top crust came out very flakey and flavorful but was a little disappointed in the bottom which was a bit on the soggy side.

While the crust was chilling in the fridge, I pitted the cherries which took about 45 minutes.

My sourdough starter had been doing quite fine the past few days,as I had been paying closer attention to refreshing it lately. It was so lively yesterday morning I decided to make one of the recipes in Reinhart's BBA. 

I was driving like a mad-man to get home from office (as best a mad-man Singapore's traffic laws would allow) anticipating my bread-baking adventure. I had to make a quick stop-over at the grocery as I had wanted to get some sharp cheddar cheese.

My three-day, rotational, Country White dough...and first attempt at blogging.

I bake this bread every third day or so, and it pretty much always turns out the same.  The original recipe is the basic white dough from Richard Bertinet's "Dough", which I absolutely love.  I stumbled upon this process one day by accident.  

1st try croissants
I used the "short method" from the Sunset book but next time I'll use the layered way as in the Sunset book or Jacque Pepin's "The Art of Cooking, Volumne 2".  

I think the oven should have been hotter (such as 425F instead of 325F).  I should have made more folds to try to get better layers but they are crunchy, chewy, and tasty........and like a magician, they  dissappeared.

I'm grateful to the people here who have helped me advance in my bread making techniques.  I want to share my joy of success with them and the rest of the community. Even though my projects are not perfect, I've always made progress. Given time and practice, they will continue to improve in the future.

Making breads must be a disease like any other addiction.  You don't want to stop once you get going.  

We just planted a baby avocado tree in our backyard.  A big storm last November uprooted one of our jacaranda trees and there was a spot available.  It will be years before our avocado bears fruit if it survives, but I am getting ahead of my game and practising my skill.  

I made David's famous Pain de Campagne AKA San Jaoquin Sourdough today. I followed his excellent instructions exactly making one large batard. I baked the loaf on a stone in the center of the oven which proofed to be the wrong rung for my on-the-small-side wall oven as the loaf got a little too brown.

I was refreshing my starter to make pain de campagne when I saw this post. Your Italian bread is beautiful inside and out. I decided to try this and was VERY happy with the results. A really delicious bread, we ate half a loaf already.