Blog posts

My first post!  I keep my bread notes in a cheap notebook stuck to my fridge, but thought a bread blog might work better, and enable me to share my notes.  I am fairly new to bread baking and find some of the posts here rather intimidating.  I took an artisan bread baking course at our local technical college last fall, developed a wild yeast starter during the class, and was off and running with the longer-fermentation methods.  Before the class I had been making all our bread, but  just plain whole wheat sandwich loaves from my own flour, mixed and kneaded and bak

Hamelman's Pain au Levain

 Reinhart's Pain au Levain

Today is my wife's birthday.  Who wouldn't want a chocolate crusted orange flavored cheese cake with an orange flavored; chocolate ganache, truffles and chocolate shavings for toppings?  Home made aranchello makes this a special birthday cake.

Many folks are putting cheese in theitr bread.  Why?  Because all bread including Cheese Bread tastes good.  Especially, if you put bacon in it.  Fresh cheese making is easy, way easier than making bread.  Here is how.

Fresh Cheese

 Ingredients

You know those drying butt-ends of sourdough bread from the previous bake that you leave sitting in a bag, in danger of being forgotten until it's too late? I hate wasting bread, so am always on the lookout for ways to use those leftover bits.

Cubed leftover bread makes great croutons, and of course you can keep yourself in good supply of bread crumbs using a food processor. I keep a bag of frozen bread crumbs in the freezer door, which I often top up.

I didn't want to cut into it. Not then. I thought that there might be something purple or green or both inside. It could easily have been a purple people eater or even something much, much worse. I had to wait until the morning light - didn't want to be crippled by darkness if it was something horrible ........and emerged very hungry. I would have needed every advantage to escape if it had attacked. I contained it in a brown paper bag so it stayed nice and comfy, unperturbed......

I was in a creative mood the other day and decided to try something different.  I have made semolina bread before but this time I decided to convert the starter over to a semolina based concoction along with a little whole wheat flour as well.  My wife had bought a nice ball of fresh mozzarella so I figured why not incorporate some cheese and throw in some roasted peppers and roasted potat