Blog posts

This is the Balthazar's Bakery's chocolate bread. I first ate it in 2007 at $9 a loaf. When I got home I searched and found the recipe online. It is a fantastic bread...but I took it up a huge notch with my starter instead of theirs. Wow..what a shreddable fantastic crumb. I also added dried cherries to 3 of the loaves.  An amazing bread. You will need a mixer to fully realize this dough. It needs 5 min and then 10 min and then about 2 min . It has the butter beaten in like a brioche but there are no eggs...lots of chocolate.

We needed some Hamburger Bun for Friday night’s monthly HB feast and have also wanted to make Mark’s rolls found here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32954/potato-rolls-video

I’m pretty sure that these aren’t supposed to be HB Buns but they looked close enough to me to give them a try and I’m glad we did.  They turned out great – s good in fact I didn’t even get a crumb shot or a HB picture either,

I have been experimenting with different flours, different hydration, refrigerated proofing, etc. to see if I can improve my sourdough baking.  This one turned out well, using a three-day method and primarily unbleached white flour and spelt flour.  There is a touch of whole wheat as well.  I liked this try and will continue to try and refine my baking!

For Thanksgiving we were visiting my wife's family in North Carolina as we always do and as usual we brought have our kitchen with us so we could bake for the main feast.

This year I made a double batch of my German Sourdough Pumpernickel Pretzel Rolls and another version of my Tangzhong Onion rolls.  I changed up some of the flour and also added some shredded cheese in the mix for added flavor.

I had been looking for bakers to bake my bread in bulk for me but never seemed to find the right one.  There were various reasons why each baker wasn't right and why I wasn't the right situation for them. Last Spring, before giving up the whole idea of selling my breads commercially, I gave it one last shot: could I develop a Gluten-Free Sourdough Bread Mix?

It took me 2 months to develop a user-friendly, genuine, sourdough bread mix. The mix takes about 24 hours to complete, less time than making gluten-free sourdough bread from scratch, about 3-4 days.

For some reason my apprentice and I had a hard time keeping the mobile Sinclair Bakery’s Potato rolls, that we were making at the same time,  out of the this week’s SD bread.

I have been meaning to make pulla for awhile, ever since various intriguing posts on the subject.   I followed a combination of jarkkolaine (formula) and Julie J.  I only had cardamon pods, so sort of stripped them and crushed them in my coffee grinder.   Not so easy.   The cardamon makes this incredibly tasty.

Hi Folks

i was reminded by work colleauges that i had not baked for a little while and that they were feeling deprived of some nice bread. So with that thought ringing in my ears and the thought that i hadn't baked since i had changed my feeding regime for the sourdough culture  where it now spends more time in the cool room than out, coming out for a couple of days for a few feeds and going back in the fridge for a longer stay.

The lead in picture shows that we baked Nisu plus other breads... Helen's picture leads in with her braided Nisu breads and her Alaskan Sourdough. We had a great time baking these breads and decided that we LOVE the dough from this Finnish Nisu (Nissua) bread... it will be the go to recipe for future sweet breads and cinnamon rolls... in fact, today I am going to make a raisin swirl bread with the same recipe.  

Here are our pictures of how this bread came out for us....

Down to my last few weeks in Canada and am now trying to clear a bit of my remaining pantry. Still have a little of the spent grains from the previous spent grain bake which I decided to incorporate in last week's bake. And why not throw in a little beer to make it a beer bread something which I wanted to try for a long time. Recipe was adapted from Dan Lepard's barm bread.

Barm:
250g Ale (I used a home-brewed Honey Basil Ale)
50g Flour
4 Tsp Starter