Blog posts

From top left, the obligatory weekly pulla braid, country blonde, apple, walnut, cream cheese bread and Italian semolina, sesame loaves!

I used a single batch of pulla dough to make both the braid, 60%  dough volume and apple, cream cheese bread, 40%dough volume. My goal with the fruit, cream cheese bread was to pack as much goodness into each bite as possible. Mission accomplished!!!

Happy baking!  Ski

I have been building my starter for about 6 weeks now, and I am finally getting the results I want.

Not that the previous breads were bad, they just lacked the sort of oven spring I was getting from Commercial yeast.

Standard Forkish Lean dough.

1st feed: 12 hrs with KAF whole wheat. 100% hydration, 50g 

2nd feed: 12 hrs with Unbleached Shepard's Pride white 100% hydration. 100g

Poolish with 100g starter + 450g flour, 100% hydration, 12hrs

Final dough: additional 500g flour, 244g water, 22g salt

Lucy was thinking ancient this weeks and was studying the oldest thing she could think of at the time – The Sun.  The Poor thing is middle age at 5 billion years old and has an appetite like nothing else around here.  It gobbles up 400-600 million tons of hydrogen a second to overheat our world but it will be doing the overheating thing much better in the future.

(Adapted from Blog titled, Sourdough Bread, Simpler by the author)

A Simple Recipe for Wild Yeast Starter:

I am really on a roll with the wholegrain baking these days.  With this Whole grain spelt bread I am using 100% whole spelt flour and taking all the short cuts possible to make it one of the easiest most reliable bread recipes I have ever made.  When its this easy, tastes so great there is no excuse not to give wholegrain bread baking a go.  Your digestion, mineral and vitamin uptake, aswell as your general health and taste buds will thank you for it.

A very tasty combination. I ground my own almond meal and added coarsely chopped almonds before the second rise. The second rise was everything I could ask for, but due to unforseen circumstances she was left out too long and had flopped back by the time she went into the oven. So it ended up too thick for a pancake and a bit too flat to be a bread. But this bread tastes so good that I will definitely mark it as a favourite and take more care with the timing in future.

I'd mentioned that I was probably going to bake a batch of SJSD (or as I use my own levain mix, soSJSD) baguettes for my wife to feed to the hungry in-laws up north later this week.

The trio are the Hameleman Pain au Levain, the (soSJSD) David Snyder Italian sesame, and these.  Once more the explosive nature of the bloom on these baguettes, as with the Pain au Levain, is really quite something.

Real Sourdough Bread, Simpler

I love love love to cook and bake, and try to keep it simple (or it would quickly consume my life). Here's what I've come up with to make authentic sourdough bread…simpler.

This first bread is the dark Silesian rye from Leader's Local Breads.  I like how the loaf looks, and it tastes and smells wonderful like good rye breads do.

This next loaf was a whole wheat and rye sandwich loaf that I brushed with olive oil.  It had a nice texture and was great spread with hummus or used for sandwiches.

Some folks like flour tortillas some like corn tortillas. – picky, picky, picky!  I say make them both compromise so you only have to make one kind – half flour and half corn and cut your work in half.