Blog posts

Three months ago, I made pizzas using Maggie Glezer's recipe for the dough. (See Pizza Napoletana) It made the best thin, crisp pizza I'd ever had. My blog on that pizza elicited many useful comments and suggestions. I incorporated some of them into the pizza I made this weekend. Thanks to Ross for the prompt to make sourdough pizza dough and to Sylvia for the mention of using a combination of bread flour and durum flour in the dough.

I’ve been experimenting with bagels and pastries and I haven’t made sourdough in San Francisco for over a month, and I’d forgotten to feed my starter.  Then, we replaced our refrigerator and some things were unrefrigerated for a spell one day last week, including my starter.

During the last two weeks I revisited the formula posted earlie in my blog:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23830/german-baking-day

with some modifications in flour composition.

Each time I return to this formula I am amazed about the eae of the mix and bake and the richness and quality of the outcome.

I won't repeat the whole process here, just as a reminder:

1. Preferment with wholegrain or medium rye, 80% hydration, 10% of mature starter, ripe after ca. 12 hours.

Pane Nero di Castelvetrano in the Wood-fired Oven

Greetings. The crazy heat in my kitchen broke for long enough to allow me a few loaves for the holiday, although the heat was so great at times that my dough just died. After a long-awaited vacation coming up next week, I am looking forward to more reasonable conditions for baking when i return.

Hello,

I have not made very many high-concentration Rye's, but I do like that you can make 'em in a day.   But then you have to wait a long time before cutting into them.   So I guess it's all the same.   In any case, here is the bake for today.    It is an 80% rye, 25% of it being what I refer to as my own "chunky rye stuff" -- milling rye berries beyond the Grob level of my Komo miller.   It results in a mixture of chunks of berries and meal.

I just made a corn semolina bread that came from a recipe on the KAF website. It will come in handy as I face the known and unknown challenges of the upcoming week.

now that i've become fairly decent at baking bread, I would like some suggestions on bread storage and freezing loaves. How long will a loaf keep in the freezer, and what is the best way to store my bread to maintain freshness? Any takers?

Richard Sennet describes the essence of proper craftsmanship as: the fluid process of deliberately setting up questions and challenges in order to solve them and increase ones skills.

This quote reminded me of so many of the wonderful TLF bakers....

The busy weeks continue in our tiny household. My partner and I both had our children staying this week with school holidays as well as her parents for a few days which allowed us to celebrate her fathers retirement.  Amongst all the chaos we prepared a roast dinner and a rhubarb and strawberry tart.