Blog posts

Today I baked a sourdough loaf in a pot...

and cinnamon rolls too.

I've been looking to branch out with the grains I use in my breads. Flipping through Bread Alone, I found a recipe for wheat bread with whole wheat berries. A friend just happened to have a jar of wheat berries on hand, so I was in business!

First things first: soak the wheat berries overnight.

Karin had a great post for Dan Lepard's brat filled Stilton cheese puff paste appetizers here:

Dan Lepard's Stilton Crust Sausage Rolls - My First Bake of 2013

A fellow user asked a great question recently:  How does a baker tell when bulk-fermentation is finished?

Of course, I do not think we can begin to answer this question without firstly asking some other questions, like:  What is fermentation, and how does one measure it?  And why ferment in bulk in the first place?

My favourite question to ask baking classes or new baking apprentices is, what is bread?

I am a Jim Lahey disciple, philosophically speaking.  There are not many in the professional-baking community.

I will forever remember the coffee-bean-like smell of torrefied wheat bran emanating from the original Sullivan St while walking past on my way home at 3 a.m.

Our tradition has always been, since my daughter can remember, to have pizza on New Year’s Eve.  This year my daughter’s boy friend wasn’t able to attend so we put off the pizza until he could – on New Year’s Day.

So pizza was the first bake of 2013 and after Pure Ugly Panettone for the last bake of 2012, we wanted to start off right.  We went back to our real old non SD, non whole grain dough at the daughter’s request.  Seem’s like kids get anything they want now a days.

The last bake of 2012, panettone, was supposed to cap off a year (actually 11 months) of usually decent individual and different bakes with different formulas that numbered well over 100 – quite an achievement that deserved a year end spectacular panettone.  But alas, it was not to be.

Sadly, baking gremlins worked their evil spells as soon as the fine looking, up to that point, panettone, hit the oven.

This was developed from a list of ingredients lifted from the display case at Arizmendi Bakery, in San Francisco. I consulted a few other similar recipes to help out with proportions. The technique is basically a stretch-and-fold approach I lifted from some Tartine recipe in a magazine.

Levain