Blog posts

I figured that I'd make myself a blog rather than posting back into the forums all the time. No point cluttering up a perfectly good forum with my one-track-minded baking experiences! 

Last weekend I took another shot at the 100% Sourdough Rye recipe kindly passed on to me by a good work colleague. My previous attempt had been a fair to middling success, and I was confident that this would turn out even better than the first. I was pleasantly surprised by how good the loaves turned out, given my total inexperience in making bread. 

Susan from San Diego Sourdough

Susan's Sourdough Crumb

This bread was made from the Whole Wheat Oatmeal Bread recipe in George Greenstein's book Secrets of a Jewish Baker.  It's a really good bread, which has a very nice flavor and somewhat reminds me of a Scandanavian bread in texture; fairly open but substantial.  The recipe call for a sponge but this bread isn't difficult to make and is baked in a loaf pan.  As Mr.

PR Italian

Italian Bruchetta & White Bean Soup

This bread was begun with the highest hopes and a bubbly poolish...

cooking in the wood fired oven is very different than cooking in the house. it is both easier and more difficult - easier in that the oven holds its heat steady so there is none of the temperature compenstation strategies, and the hearth makes a huge difference in the crust. more difficult in that it takes SO MUCH LONGER and the timing is really tricky.

overall, though, i want to retire so i can just cook all our meals in it. this is the best and most satisfying project i've done yet.

anyway, here are some pics from the last few weeks:

It was the nicest kind of serendipity that drew me into working with barley. A friend asked if I could make her some sprouted barley bread. She heard that sprouted grain breads are healthy, and she knows how much I enjoy a challenge.

Naturally, my first stop was TFL. Mini O, how did I miss that you were working with barley, too? I guess I was too focused at that point on "sprouted barley bread" as a search term. I found some references to other barley breads and looked further afield.

Dear friends

I made a pumpkin recipes festival on an arabic site , on the cooking forum.I made a lot of plates from the pumpkin: salads , jams , cakes & muffins , ice cream , pumpkin pie & this bread.

I will show you the pumpkin loaf , it was very tasty and very light, easy & simple to make.

I can share the recipe if there is anybody interrested in, let me show you:

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another shape:

Seems appropriate to make my first blog post about pumpernickel. Mentioned in my intro post yesterday that it was Horst Bandel's Black Pumpernickel in Jeffrey Hamelman's book Bread that brought me to The Fresh Loaf. Growing up in multi-cultural Winnipeg, Manitoba, I was exposed to so many wonderful ryes. So while I was at baking school, I made whatever breads (and other things) we were assigned and then worked overtime on the ryes.