Blog posts

Stuck indoors with a head cold and raining all day..What would you do?  Surfed on my PC and landed at Steve's Bread Cetera blog.  http://www.BreadCetera.com   I thought the 100% White Whole Wheat looked delicious and then I saw his lovely Croissants...my husband and I love pastries and the neighbors get a sample too,  after seeing the wonderful posts on Shiao Pings blog with meat pies in puff pastry and TaxFarmer's  croissants, my sweet tooth took over...last night I made the poolish for both.

This weekends fun.

Home Bolted High Extration Hard Red Spring Wheat Miche

1050g Flour
578g Water
525g Leaven 100% hydration
26g Salt

Mix ingredients. Stir until there are no more dry spots. Autolyse for 60 minutes.

Fold  wait 30 minutes fold again. Bulk proof until almost double. Shape and proof

This weekend I made a miche with Gérard Rubaud's flour mix for the first time. It's nowhere near as beautiful as the ones with which Shiao-Ping introduced Rubaud's formula to TFL, but it is delicious. The miche does seem to have a more mellow flavor than the other breads I've made with this flour mix, but then I didn't slice and taste it for a good 15 hours after it was baked.

The flour mix and formula I used was ...

I thought to pass on this wonderful recipe from King Arthur's Whole Grain Cookbook.  The maple flavoring in the bread is a nice top note and the walnuts are a bonus with nice texture.  Try it...you'll like it.    You gotta love baking bread!

I've read a number of places on this fantastic site about the benefits of soaking whole grain flours before incorporating them into a dough, and I happened to give it a try yesterday while preparing today's loaf of bread, a Rosemary and Thyme Sourdough Boule.  While I was preparing the fresh herbs, I added the usual amount of (hot) water to the 1 cup of wholewheat flour I wanted to use in the dough.  That soaked while I stripped the thyme off the stalks and chopped the rosemary needles.  I threw the herbs on top of the soaking flour (and incidentally, I had also added the tab

I made the dough for the evening restaurant class on thursday as there were quite a few absentees from the class the lecturer said you dont want to make the bread for me do you? The deal was that i had a free hand,and could make whatever I pleased! SO I had several bottles of coopers dark ale set aside that were up to their code date so at 2.30 pm I refreshed my sour dough starter and added what i would have discarded to 1.5litres of dark ale  and 1 kg of Bakers flour and made a nice slurry.

So here we are in New Hampshire.  Spring is arriving early it seems, which means we will soon have to hang up our baking hat for the business season.  Lately we have been experimenting with a daily loaf.  Looking for the right combination that everyone in the house will enjoy.  That is very hard if impossible, since one family member likes "wonderbread" style wheat and on the other end of the spectrum another enjoys a hearth style toothsome bread.  Others in the household, in between.  Even the english springer spaniel has a favorite in a cr