Blog posts

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." 

It took a few days to recover from bread overload I got at the Boston TFL meetup (thanks so much for organizing, Varda). Time to try something new.  Pumpkin seed bread from the Seven Stars Bakery in Providence, RI as described by MC Farine has been on the list for a while.

So today i made a Cinnamon Brown Sugar Babka. I am quite new to baking and i'm fairly certain i'm not taking the regular route a novice baker would. I've made a few loaves of regular bread, some Pita bread that was quite heavenly (along with some Pita chips), and now today a Babka. I'm thinking about a baguette or perhaps some bagels next. Anyway here are some pictures of this lovely piece of heaven! 

This is off topic, I recognize, but this was only the second time in eight years I stepped away from TFL for more than a day or two, so I hope you'll allow me to indulge in a couple of off topic posts!  Hopefully they'll be a of interest to some of you.  -Floyd

It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized how long it had been since we last visited Poland.  Seventeen years.