Blog posts

My wife requested an Italian style bread to go with her lasagna for this weekends belated holiday dinner with my family.  I couldn't just make a simple Italian bread of course, so I made a new version of an older formula I posted about early last year.  This is loosely based on Peter Reinhart's Italian bread from BBA where he uses a biga which I replaced with a durum based starter.  I also used some freshly milled white hard wheat, freshly milled spelt and rye flours along with KAF French style and Durum.

I had a request to make crusty sourdough rolls when my husband and I were visiting family in England for the holidays.  I brought along my sourdough starter in checked luggage (TSA searched it), but the "baby" white and rye sourdough starters came through very well.  In fact, they performed better than the "mother" sourdough starters back in the U.S.

…based upon a formula by Francesco Favorito.

Oh my. These are some damn fine tasting doughnuts, easily the best I have ever eaten, seriously!

Lucy decided to help the girls out with their white bread fix by making another one, a SD one this time, for them to gnaw on   To make the bread a little moiré healthy, we also added in some whole, rye, spelt and wheat.  TO increase the flavor we added in our favorite taste enhancers (that aren’t Toadies), 10 g each of corn, potato and steel cut oat and a bit of farina.

 I've been wanting to try the Ken Forkish style pizza dough ever since David Snyder on TFL posted about his great love for this formula and procedure here.  David changed some of the timing in the recipe to achieve the ultimate results.  I followed his directions pretty closely with the only thing I changed being I used my mixer on low speed for the initial mix and used some fresh milled white hard wheat flour in place of the WW he used.

We spent the holidays with my husband's family in England.  We haven't been able to do that many times over the years, so it was very nice.  I brought my sourdough starter with me, white and rye.  I put it in checked baggage; TSA searched the bag, but the starter came through very well.  It started up very easily, and I baked many things while we were over.  I'll try and share some of them.  It was fun to be able to bake over the holidays while we there!

Hello to all fellow bakers, greetings from Indonesia. I never wrote a blog before, so this is my first time really.

So ... I finally got an ear (!!) which is good and I'm very happy. Huzzah!!

The "good" loaf is misshapen (the "bad" loaf is horribly misshapen) ... I did not do what I normally do, which is to jury-rig a couche with kitchen towels. I need a real linen couche, which is on my list of things to get. My older daughter (14 yo) was very surprised when I pulled the finished loaves from the oven and noted the ear (lol).

Helen chose this bake. The lead in picture is her crumb. Watching Martha Stewart bakes on YouTube.com was what really convinced us to do the bake... She made this bread look so good and so easy... Good and Easy are two of our favorite ingredients!!!

Here is the dough.  Helen's comment was that this was a nice little "cheesy" dough ball... looks great! The dough was moist and somewhat sticky. Nice and soft.

I followed the three stage build by the book and only varied from the formula at the proof and bake stage. I shaped a boule and proofed seam side down in my new brotform, then baked in a hot cast iron dutch oven. I did score the loaf and I thought it looked like I had deflated it, but the loaf sprang nicely and the seams burst organically.