Blog posts

I know it’s spring…not fall but the pumpkins sold in supermarket look gorgeous. If you’ve read my previous pumpkin pancakes post, you know I hate pumpkin. However, I can take it when it’s mashed and mixed into pancakes and bread, and to be honest, I adore the striking yellow-orange colour they add to the dough.

My husband and I are taking our first trip anywhere since we were married 3 years ago. We didn't have the funds for a honeymoon and the kiddo was created just one month after we said our vows.  This year, for my birthday, I asked him to arrange a long weekend and surprise me with the destination. I wanted somewhere close enough that we could be back in a flash if necessary, but far enough that we had to take a plane. He chose Portland. 

After a couple of really good attempts to recreate a Brooklyn style pizza, I had a couple of disasters. Trying to slide a 16" dough disk onto a 16" steel proved to need more precision than I could muster.  I was ready to quit, when my wife reminded me how good the pies were before I got the steel. On her advice I combined the two methods. Pizza screen on the steel.

It has been a while since dough.doc posted the Larraburu process for making their famous San Francisco SD bread from the late 60’s and early 70’s.  It really was great bread made by the thousands of loaves.  There were a couple, three things that hit me as being strange after reading the process.

Hi guys,

I' m a cook in Italy, and getting a break,  I would improve my passion for bread alone in my home.

Many times for the oven I ve got (an old gas one without vent) I felt limited and frustrated, for problem such as keeping the vapour initially  and the size of the chamber, making only one or two loaves a time, etc.. 

I live in italy and solutions for home baker such as Rofco ovens are not available.

Crisp and flaky sesame pockets. I have wanted to try my hand at these for a while. I don't think I had the best recipe and had to improvise a bit.

They came out ok and we enjoyed the nutty taste. And I now have a sesame coated kitchen. 

More recipes I found interesting:

https://food52.com/recipes/26083-explosively-layered-sesame-shao-bing

This is a pretty bold bake on my Hamelman 50% WW multigrain with freshly home milled kamut in place of WW.  I sifted and used the hard bits in the levain.  My hot soaker was a mix of durum, toasted old bread crumbs from my last batch, brown flax (left whole for a change), mixed rolled grains, and my faux red rye malt.  The cold final rise was about 18 hours.  I was happy that the timing worked for me to give the less bold loaf to my mother for her 81st birthday.  We were both pleased with the taste.

Multigrain, seeded bread - using up end of bag of wholemeal flour, hence 84g wholemeal, 75g dark rye, 300g white bead flour, with 3malt sunflower seed flour to make up to 800g, 400g 50% starter, 650g water. Autolysed for just under an hour, 20g salt added and dough developed. 150g mixed ‘seeds’ added towards end of slap and folds (cut malted rye grains, pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, linseed,poppy), then 3 sets of stretch and folds over next hour and a half, as dough seemed slacker than I was expected. In total, 4 hours of bulk at room temp (probably about 66-68 as heating not on initially).

I bought some "Country Wild Rice" at Whole Foods a few weeks ago and wanted to use some of the leftover cooked rice in a bread.  The rice is a combo of brown, whole grain Wehani, and whole grain black Japonica and is very tasty all by itself.

I had some Guinness left over from the corned beef my wife made in the Instant Pot a few weeks ago and I thought some fresh milled barley flour would go perfect with this combination.