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I'm trying to make sourdough bread with Tartine's method, and I can't seem to get past the "make your leaven float" part. I've been maintaing a liquid starter for a month now, and a dry starter for a week, and I just can't even produce a leaven that will float, so I haven't even bothered to warm the oven yet. So lots of flour and water going into the recycling bin, lots of time spent trying to keep my  various colonies happy, and nary a loaf to even dislike. It's worse than bad bread. It's no bread. WTF do I do? I'm feeling exasperated.

I just received my new order from KAF the other day and was dying to try some of my new flours I ordered.  I wasn't too happy though when I received an email the day after it arrived telling me how excited I should be about the KAF 20% off sale!

This 40% whole grain bread is a combination YW and SD starter, seeded, multi-grain that does not have sprouts or a scald.  The hydration of 79% is not too much for a bread with so much whole Rye, WW, spelt and WWW.  There is also semolina in the starter and the dough as well.  There is a little potato flake, red and white rye malt, wheat germ and 6 kinds of seeds.  Sunflower-25 g, anise-3g, hemp-10g, coriander-2g and fennel-3g with only the flax seeds ground into a flour.  Since the bread was not retarded to bring out additional SD flavor it had a slight t

Hello everyone, 
Continuing to be inspired by Beth Hensperger’s beautiful book, Bread For All Seasons…
the next chapter begins with June and is titled ‘Sun Food’.

I’ve baked three breads of Italian origin over the last while, using ‘yellow-colored’ flours -
thinking about 'sun food' (sun bread), I wanted to call these breads ‘pane di sole’ :^)


Micca di enkir e buratto

I decided to attempt Pain au Levain again, but this time with a few changes. 

1.) I added Flax meal, Corn meal, and Rye to make my own "Country" Pain au Levain. 

2.) I baked it as 1 huge boule instead of 2 smaller ones. 

3.) I proofed for 4 hrs BEFORE retarding in the fridge this time. 

4.) I had to significantly increase the baking time due to the size of the boule.

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Some recent bread made into lunches , the last bloom of the jackaranda and a blueberry, blackberry, chocolate cheese cake.

Sweet Tader Toast with caramelized minneola marmelade

Since I started bread baking last year I've been aiming mainly at sourdough and have made some reasonably good loaves at the weekend but it has been a challenge to fit it into the week's work schedule. The comparatively long rise of approx. 4 hours means I'd be baking at 22:50 if I made the loaf on getting home from work. Letting it rise in the fridge while I'm at work seems a pretty good solution to this, and here's how I've worked it so far.

When some friends invited us to the beach at West Wittering (near Chichester, England) last week, they asked me to bring some spelt bread, as they try to stay away from wheat.

Based on my previous experiments with spelt I came up with two very delicious.

Not even the fine sand on Wittering Beach (which gets just about everywhere) could do harm to the culinary experience (on the way home it was mentioned that we passed the food test ;-) )

== UPDATE ==