Blog posts

Bread authors have slowly nudged me toward buying some organic and stone ground flours to experiment with. Exploring the web and other sources led me to hone in on War Eagle Mill (WEM) in Rogers Arkansas for my source for they have a good reputation and are closer than most. When they ran a 20% off sale with free shipping for orders over $100 I had to give it a try so I ordered 25 pounds each of organic AP and BF (roller milled), and 10 pounds each of stone ground organic WW and White WW. The flour came Wednesday so I cranked up the oven to make Tartine yesterday. Photo below.

As promised, I am keeping you up to date with my recent baking adventures.  I have a love for baguettes but nothing has given me more grief than this elusive bread.  I have baked these loaves a number of times but have failed to develop the nice open airy crumb that beckons me to bake them as often as I do.  

Seeds everywhere!  Lots of seeds!  Seeds in the dough seeds around the dough.  Seeds, seeds, seeds!  A few nuts too and my favorite flours, Rye and Spelt.   Lots of fibre! 

DOUGH    in order:

Yet more variations on my 36 hours+ sourdough baguette formula. ((original recipe here, 3 earlier variations here, 3 more variations here) I love the taste of wholegrain, also like the nutritional value, but mostly I actually just love the rich sweet fragrant taste.

I'm finally able to drag myself to my computer to edit photos and do a fancy write-up of my latest bakes…  I've been spending too much time at work lately, and have not had time to write about baking, which seems to take more time and effort than just baking alone…  

Let me start by saying that I have always thought of my self as the kind of guy who when faced with a self made disaster, would take credit for it. My reply on another thread that I thought stove top baking in a dutch oven is possible, is why I'm posting my trial bake. Not everything I try is beautiful, as you can see. I think I learned enough to make corrections in the burner level and have a better result. Who ever said you can't really burn bread hasn't tried this method.

Some bread I've been working on for a restaurant competing in a cast iron cook-off.  

Since the liquids in nearly every dough need to be tempered, I went looking for some straight forward, repeatable method to get the temperature I wanted. My answer was to use the microwave. The next step was to figure out how to get the right time for any mass of water or milk, and for any temperature change.

We can see that the time required (Sec) is proportional to the mass of the water (M) and to the change in temperature (ΔT), multiplied by some constant (C). 

M × ΔT = C × Sec

Rearranging to solve for the time; Sec = M × ΔT / C