Blog posts

My apprentice says that sane German bakers don’t usually try to do a pumpernickel style bake of; slowly reducing low temperatures over a long baking time, when baking white bread of any kind.  But, I figured that if professional bakers can call a bread with only 25% to 30% of rye flour in it a rye bread, then we should be able to DaPumperize a white bread too.  

Thank you all for the excellent articles and posts on Larraburu french bread. As a former Bay Area native I grew up with Larraburu bread and loved it. I make my own bread and starter. Does anyone know of a source for the original Larraburu starter. One of the bloggers described a cold storage area where they had it stored.  I would be very interested to get a sample if it is available.

Thanks,

Michael

Last week, I had some left over whole spelt flour, some corn meal, and some semolina in addition to a ripe Rye starter. Therefore, I decided to put them all to use in a new recipe as follows:

UPDATE** INSTRUCTIONS:

I've been experimenting with beer bread and granary style bread. For this round I used a doppelbock along with some stuff labeled malt powder that I got at my local Korean grocery store. I tried it with WW flour as is included in a lot of recipes, but I felt like it was competing with the malt powder, so this one is just AP flour, plus what's in my starter.

After returning from the first ever TFL gathering in Lexington MA last weekend I wanted to use some the rye starter that Varda gave me to make a rye bread.  Dave Snyder posted his latest bake of the above bread on The Fresh Loaf this past week and pushed me over the edge to try it myself.  You can find the recipe at his original post

This is the result of my weeks of practice making baguettes. I posted a question in the forum and thanks to everyone who provided help. I have finally nailed down the problem and have made 3 consistant good batches. Turned out my problem is not only at scoring, but also the fermentation time, my oven temp,  and steaming duing baking.

Decided to proof a little longer to see if there was a difference in crumb and taste.

As soon as it cools I will slice and taste. It is slightly darker on the outside which I like but I don't know if my sainted wife will.

Cheers,

Wingnut

P.S.

This is my last post about my trip before returning to posts about managing the site and baking, I promise! -Floyd

As far as I can recall, we ate Polish food exclusive on this trip.  Not out of necessity, mind you: at least in cities like Warszawa and Kraków you can dine on sushi, burgers, Italian food, phó, pretty much anything you like now. Chains like Starbucks, McDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, and KFC are about as common as in the rest of Europe.  We didn’t take this trip to eat American or Italian or Japanese though, we went to eat Polish.

Today's bake was the Pain au Levain from Hamelman's Bread. It is the "whitest" bread I bake - the opposite end of a spectrum from the 80% rye I recently posted - yet I also characterize it as a "real bread."