Blog posts

Hi all,

It's been a while since I posted something here, so I thought I should put up some photos I've taken of stuff I've hauled from the oven over the last month or so. I've been occupied with the bread and pastry books by Friberg and Suas, so all of these recipes are taken from those sources.

Breads

I've baked most of the sourdough breads from ABAP, and I've found the sourdough rye and sourdough multigrain to be excellent breads. I've made a variation on the rye twice - first as a boule:

greetings all

I haven't posted in a while but I have been baking. This weekend I made Hamelman's Five-grain levain. The only changes I made was to use whole rye berries as opposed to rye chops and also pumpkin seeds in place of the sunflower seeds. I didn't realize I was out until it was to late. I baked one of the loaves on the day the mixed the dough and put the rest of the dough in the refrigerator overnight. I wanted to compare the flavor and texture the cold fermentation had on the dough.

Hi Folks,

You guys have seen this many times over and I was hesitant to post it, but I really wanted to acknowledge the generous spirit of TRAILRUNNER and MARNI who were kind enough to give me the link on how to make a woven round challah.  This was like a month ago and I finally got around to doing it last Good Friday.  I was quite nervous at first, and the instructions given on the site were rather confusing but I managed to get it right on the second try.  I'll have to do it soon again lest I forget the technique.

After many recent flops with my baking, it was SO rewarding to have a huge hit this morning! The house smells wonderful and we almost couldn't wait for them to cool to get the icing on. I may never eat a canned cinnamon roll again. I attempted to make these very slightly more healthy with some of the substitutions below as well as using considerably less raw sugar in spice mix and icing. With the melange of flavors it wasn't missed at all.

SulaBlue's Cranberry-Orange Cinnamon Buns

Peach Daisy Ring for Easter.

This is our Easter Sweet Bread.  Glazed with homemade peach jam, almond icing dotted with slivers of fresh almonds.

Sylvia

I have continued to play with my formula for what I call "San Joaquin Soudough." This continuing series of experiments started with my curiosity as to whether the baguette formula of Anis Bouabsa could be applied to other types of bread than baguettes. The short answer is, of course, "yes."

The basic approach I have been using is described in detail in the following blog entry:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/8454/pain-de-campagne 

Well it's Good Friday and time for some Hot Cross Buns and good memories!  Mom made Hot Cross Buns all year round.  They were a favorite to take on their weekly fishing trips.  Back in the 70's I gave her a recipe for them I found in my Sunset Magazine's Bread recipe book...I still have it!  Today I tweeked the recipe and added some K.A.

My first try to use a starter to bake a sourdough bread was Mountaindog's Cherry Pecan Pain au Levain which was so dense and almost unedible.  I was sure something was not right with my starter.  So I requested MD post some pictures of his levains for me for guidance, which he did with nice illustrations.  I followed that to feed my starter for over a week and tried to build a levain with bubbles that would match those of MD's and finally I thought my starter was ripe enough to make breads, I tried the Country French Bread (Thom Leonard's), also from MD's blog :

I had taken a few loaves (my first attempt) Paul's Sweet Vanilla Challah from the oven and was working on my photo's. I went back to get the smaller loaf to re- do the shot and it had been assaulted! My shaping was out of practice on my challah, but the taste is fantastic.