Blog posts

It was Tony Bennett who first sang "I left my heart in San Francisco" at the Venetian Room of Fairmont Hotel in 1962.  He is now in his 80s.   Many people in Asia who have not been to San Francisco or do not know much about San Francisco (like me) know it through this song (and the post card fog covered Golden Gate Bridge). 

Four afternoons of hands-on baking--that's Hands-on with a capital H. We started with first steps for making croissants, and sourdough levain, went on to bake lavash, classic baguettes (poolish),  sunflower sourdough bread, rye fougasse (w/preferment), miche, and pizza. The latter two were baked in a wood fired oven; all our other dough were baked in the KA Bakery oven.

My first attempt at SD was a disaster.  Thanks to the great input I received, I embarked on a 2nd attempt yesterday/today.  This is Hamelman's Vermont SD recipe.  My liquid levain culture (Norman) was 11 days old yesterday.  I created the levain build early yesterday morning, too early, and it overripened.  Since I knew it had fermented for about 22 hours, instead of the 16 max recommended, I decided to only do a 1/2 recipe (until I get it right).  I mixed everything early this morning.  The bulk ferment took about 6.5 hours to result in just less than a d

as mentioned, I got a basket from the sfbs. It took a few weeks before I could try it out, TFL is a good resource for tips. The first attempt is actually a slow bread, it looked promising. The pattern is not that good. The other breads are all SF sourdough.



Here (below) I tried scoring the bread, but I guess it was not deep enough (or too late in the rise).

I delayed this bread long enough, i thought to myself. It was, afterall, the inspiration behind baking craziness. The bread is 1/3 Barley and 2/3 Wholewheat.

Taste? mmm.. it was sourdough, though some 1.6 tsp of yeast was used in the final dough. The bread tastes: Wholesome- Soury- Fibery- damp- chewy - Crusty. Thats is the way i felt when i took a bite. Regrets? Would skip the  Wholewheat starter and go for a yeast poolish to somewhat reduce sourness, though the bread was mildly sour.

Ingredients:

150 g Whole Barley flour

300 g Whole Wheat Flour

George Greenstein's “Secrets of a Jewish Baker” is a wonderful source for traditional New York-style Jewish baked goods. It has been criticized for giving ingredients in volume measurements only, though. I have previously provided Greenstein's formula for Jewish Sour Rye with ingredient weights, but I realized today that I had never done this for another of my favorite Greenstein breads – Pumpernickel. So, here is Greenstein's pumpernickel formula converted to weights.

Doesn't it drive you crazy when you scale a formula down to a size you can make at home and you end up needing .011 oz. of yeast? You can do this if you have a scale that will measure in grains or fractions of grams.  A grain is a unit of weight that is 1/7000 of a pound or about 1/438 of an oz.  When I'm making poolish for my home-size batch of croissants and find that I need .005 oz.

[b]Didier Rosada[/b] is our instructor at Artisan III course at the San Francisco Baking Institute.  The course is intensive in technical knowledge as in baking schedule.  Didier is an incredible instructor with amazing energy; he "trained and led the Bread Bakers Guild Team USA to first place victory in the bread category at the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris in 1996."

Struan is the bread that truly launched his bread baking career, Reinhart says (p. 102). In Gaelic, struan means “the convergence or confluence of streams,” a good description for multigrain breads where all kinds of grains and seeds are coming together (the combinations are, of course, endless).