Blog posts

Many more photos get taken than appear on my blog. Picking and choosing is an agonizing task. Sometimes a photo just doesn't fit within the context of the prose but more often than not I have just taken so many photographs that tough compromises need to be made. I have decided to collect an assortment of photos and post them so they may see the light of day. Many will be familiar to readers of my past blog entries.

Please welcome the B-sides Part 1 ...

Please welcome the B-sides Part 2 ...

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Please welcome the B-sides Part 3 ...

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It has been several months since I made baguettes.   I had promised myself I would do a multi-week baguette experiment and compare different formulas and build my technique. But life intervened.  I’ve been very busy at work, and there never seems to be time for baking all the breads I want to bake.

We took 100 g of our last bake:  The SD / YW Chacon Revisited – 90% Whole Grain, Multigrain Sprouts, Walnut and Sage Paste, and Pumpkin Seeds and used that as the starter for the pizza and pide dough.  It was weird having nuts, seeds and sprouts in the final dough but sure made forming the crusts fun and interesting with these add-ins tearing holes when ever they were encountered :-)

After having such a nice loaf turn out from the last Chacon bake, we thought we would do everything we could to mess it up – and we did mess up more than half of it without much difficulty at all.  These things happen when you try new things.  Not to worry when we can learn from near disasters.

I recently came across a gadget that can be used to maintain starter temperatures in a rather easy way.  The LUX WIN100 is a programmable thermostat with built in sensor that also has an outlet.  It is designed for room air conditions or heaters where a constant temperature is desired.  The unit plugs in and when the desired temperature is reached, the power cuts off.  After cooling down a degree or two, it comes back on keeping a rather constant heat.

My wife got me the Kettle Pizza cooker for my BD (discussed in this thread here). This is the 18.5" model, MSRP $129.95. This is my first try. Not bad, but need to tweak techniques: the timing - how long to heat the stone for ideal crust; how to spin it around; when to yank parchment paper; ideal temp to start cooking, etc. The trick is to balance cooking the crust with the top. I missed it by that much on this go-round. 

I was reading someone elses post the other day and they commented that they were using a smoked flour for their next bake.  I love just about anything smoked...ribs, brisket, chicken...you name it as far as I'm concerned it tastes better after smoking with some wood.  Unfortunately the flour in question is only available in England and Amazon UK will not ship to the USA, so I figured the n

A sequel to my previous WFO bake of my Greek Pide.  This time it was baked in my electric oven 'EO' just because...I had nothing better to do and wanted to use the dough I had frozen from last weeks previous bake and I was curious to see how the GP would turn out versus the heat of the WFO.  Well, the results were pleasing.  Flavor wise...well very pleasing from the EO..excellent from the WFO.  No doubt there are certain types of breads that benefit from the smokey hot flames, coals and intense heat of a WFO.