Blog posts

I have been for the last couple of weeks using a nearly pure rye sourdough starter and have baked nothing but the New York Deli recipe from P. Reinhart's BBA.  I love the addition of the fried onions.  So far I have added the onions to the final dough and at some pont I will try adding them to the starter to see if it makes a difference.  For my last bake, I reduced the fried onion and added garlic to cook lightly, but not brown.  With the heat off, I added the caraway seed and fresh rosemary.

This So Not Stollen is based on a modification to a real Dresden Christmas Stollen recipe that was posted by nellapower here:  Refer to it for most of the method with a few exceptions below.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/25407/dresden-christmas-stollen

New Breads from Old Favourite Flours

In the beginning of the fall, I took my boys with me on a small trip to Vääksyn mylly, a small mill at about 150 kilometers from where I live. It's the mill of choice of Viipurilainen kotileipomo, the family run bakery I visited earlier this year (and featured in issue 2 of my magazine, Bread), and the owner of the mill is my friend on Facebook. 

I've been baking slight variations on this 2 kg miche weekly for a month or so and it's time to share.  It's very good.  So good that it's keeping me from moving on to my endless backlog of must-try formulae from books and TFL blogs. 

As those of you who have made San Joaquin Sourdough know, my procedure calls for a 21 hour cold retardation during bulk fermentation. The length of the cold retardation was taken from Anis Bouabsa via Jane Benoit (janedo on TFL). While I have often increased or decreased the 21 hours by 3 hours or so, I have been wary of a much longer time, because I feared proteolysis would result in unacceptable gluten degradation.

Today, I baked. I baked a no-knead loaf, a sourdough loaf, and batch of Hamelman's Cinnamon Raisin Oatmeal bread.

Something else exciting I worked on this weekend...

Hello everyone,

We visited Terra Breads recently and sampled their apple focaccia (loved it! – a really delicious, seasonal bread for fall).
A friend of mine and I were talking about salted caramel awhile ago...a flavor I adore.
Here is what I came up with, trying to re-create Terra Bread’s delicious apple focaccia, with salted caramel, 
here at home :^)