Blog posts

Another fine lunch for a lazy Sunday.  This time  Cotto Salami with veg and Colby, banana, red and green diced Hatch Chili on top of feta, carrot, celery sticks with sliced red pepper on the salad, cantaloupe, left over grilled onions and peppers, Dill, B&B and jalapeno pickles with brie on the watermelon, black grapes, raspberries and the best half of a nectarine sliced we have ever tasted.  Eaten by the pool with a nice limoncello made with diet squirt. 

Hamelman's "Vollkornbrot" is a 100% rye bread with sunflower seeds. The flour Hamelman calls for is "rye meal," which I just happend to have in quantity due to my error in ordering "medium rye meal" when I had intended to order "medium rye flour" from nybakers.com. Well, as Kubler-Ross wrote, "There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from."

I have been on a baking hiatus, of sorts, realizing that the stash of bread in my freezer needed to be reduced.  Having worked through that gradually, I finally got around to baking again the weekend before Labor Day.

I've decided that I'm gonna start sticking these on a blog rather than the forums. Mostly because this is the first -really- successful bread I've made. Like, I'm making another two loaves of it right now, just with a bit less rising time. :P

The ingredients:

4c AP flour
1/2tsp salt
8oz medium cheddar cheese, diced
1/4c VWG
2oz grated parmesan
1/2tsp ground chipotle pepper
2c water
2 1/2tsp ADY
1tsp liquid smoke flavor
1 egg, beaten with some water to thin it out (for a wash)
1 sugar cube (to proof yeast)

Hi all 

Firstly- apologies for the lack of postings to those of you kind enough to read and post on this blog.  The past few months have been a mixture of intense activity combined with long periods of extremely frustrating inactivity.  I won't go into the specifics of why things have been progressing so slowly because I don't want to rock the boat where fragile inter-personal relationships are involved!

Hi Fellow TFL folk

I have recently returned from a 3 month holiday that took us to the UK. We flew with Emirates on the 7th May from Perth @6.00am for  a non stop flight to Dubai aboard a Boeing 777 -200LR literaly overseas for 11 hours ,a quick 1 hr 15 minutes to change planes and an Airbus A380-800 to London. a mere 6hrs and 45 minutes. arriving at local time  6.40pm  we were then taken to the Hilton hotel in Kensington for the night, an extremely long day (32 hours.)

County Fair 2012!  The prospect of a few blue ribbons is all the excuse I need to take a day off work and spend it baking instead.  Actually, I'd be happy to ditch work and bake bread with no excuse at all but that might worry people…  

I managed to put together six different breads from four different doughs this year. 

It is really odd and slightly annoying that the spell checker wants to replace kamut with kaput.  Is this a pre-judgment before the start?   But, after seeing the results that Michael Wilson achieved with his similar White Spelt Bread here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/29146/100-white-spelt-100-hydration

After recently making spice buns using the recipe for "multipurpose sweet dough" on page 130 of Crust and Crumb by Peter Reinhart with so-so results I tried a modified version of the recipe.  Others almost universally include eggs in recipes for similar doughs, but Reinhart does not.  Assuming eggs might have have been inadvertantly left off Reinhart's ingredient list, I included 2 eggs (~100g) in my latest batch.  This resulted in a much nicer dough, soft and kneadable where the previous by-the-book dough was so dry it wouldn't come together in the mixing bo

This is my first blog entry. I have visited this site a few times over the past year, but only joined today (Sept. 4,2012). My name is Christopher and a I bake mainly sourdough breads to sell at a local farmers market on Saturdays. Actually, my wife does the selling and I generally sleep in the truck.....Friday is always a long night!

I look forward to exploring this site and perhaps getting to know people on here.

Christopher