Blog posts

Hello, I've been gone for a while from TFL, but never turned my back on baking. Hope to post some more again :)

Here are some multigrain rolls from last week's dinner

decided to have another go at Reinhart's Oat Bran Broom bread. Recipe as follows (I changed a couple of things as I wanted to lighten the loaf a little)

Soaker (as per recipe)
184 g whole wheat flour
16.7 g oat bran
14 g flax seed
4 g salt
198 g water
Mixed and left on bench overnight.

The road to this one lead via juicy pancake plains.

A few months ago, I realised that I'm barely using the gram flour I have (which should be mostly chickpeas), mostly because the legumes most likely haven't been soaked and had a much stronger, somewhat bitter taste. At the time, I was experimenting with various flours for pancakes, as well as fillings. I was also playing around with leavened pancake dough.

Sweet bread is a bit of a staple in Latin America and Mexico.  Its something that I make very rarely, these sugar-shell topped conchas are really delicious, i made Orange and chocolate versions instead of traditional white or Matcha tea flavoured Conchas.

http://mybreadandbrot.com/orange-chocolate-mexican-conchas/

I have been homebaking breads and pizza doughs for a few years but I'm stuck.  It seems that the ingredients available to the "home baker" are much more limited than for commercial places (well--we sure buy less quantity).

Always up for a challenge (except when I’m not) I recently came across TxFarmer’s fantastic Laminated Sandwich Loaf blog entry from Dec. 2011.  As I am now a new inductee into the Lamination Game via my two recent forays into croissant making, I though that I’d give this a whirl as well.  I'm also a sucker for trying other things that she's displayed on TFL.

It's amazing how far your confidence can plummet after baking a whole string of inedible sourdough frisbees. Necessity (and hunger) got the better of me, so this week I switched back to a hybrid recipe that's always worked well.

405g flour

20g oat bran

300g tepid water

9g salt

4g dried active yeast

45g rye starter

Tablespoon vegetable oil (I use rape seed oil)

I am reminded of my favorite mythical philosopher; Yoda, who said ‘Try Not! Do or do not.  There is no try!  Yesterday was a day to try men’s souls – if there were any men. or women, left in the world.

The Fed was supposed to raise interest rates a lousy quarter point from and eighth of a point where it has been for 7 years as the entire world melted down because a few people couldn’t pay their mortgages back to the banks in the USA.

For a long time, I've been trying to create breads (lean and enriched) that should look like society's ideals; dark crackly singing // delicate crust, blooming scores, holey // feathery soft crumb; those are some of the hallmarks of  great loaves achieved with the help of an oven. No matter how hard I tried, it won't be just the same and won't be enough to reach those standards for many. It's like that weeny teen spending hours in the gym to earn his six pack to be considered hot/in/cool/popular.

I don’t make white bread; I've made something worst: brioche made with all-purpose flour and butter. “Everything tastes better with butter.” There is no shame in that, for some occasional guilty pleasure.

The best part of making brioche is in the making. I’ve made four versions of brioche over the last few months:

• Tartine brioche with natural leaven 

(http://flourishen.blogspot.com/2014/09/tartine-brioche.html)

• Tartine brioche with olive oil