Blog posts

First, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Floyd for making this post with images possible on the new TFL system.  It keeps getting better and better.  Thank you!

The following are photos of Mark Sinclair's Portuguese Sweet Bread and Rolls that I made recently.  I divided the dough in half and made 2 loaves of bread and a dozen or so rolls.  Both the bread and rolls are excellent and favorites at our house.  The bread is very good either plain or toasted and the rolls are wonderful as breakfast rolls or as sandwiches. 

Despite all the server brou-ha-ha, I've still managed to bake a few times.

A standard Pain Sur Poolish loaf, still more-or-less using this recipe.  Served with a pot of minestrone soup.  My goal is to make one pot of soup a week all winter long and try as many new soup recipes as I can.  Where there's soup, there's bread!

Here are some of my recent bakes: First off is Pane di Como from Daniel Leader's "Local Breads". This is basically a simple white loaf leavened with a biga. It's pretty wet and tricky to work with, and came across as a wicked hybrid of a plain country bread and a ciabatta dough. It's really wet according to my bread standards (73%), but I think it turned out alright. It turned into a flat, wet disc during the final proof, but the oven spring was nothing short of impressive. An interesting bread to bake, but I think I prefer Hamelman's country bread to this one.

The server upgrade this week went very well.  There have been a few little hiccups, but overall it went well, and the site is blisteringly fast now.

There are still a few missing features.  Most noticable, the gallery is gone.  The gallery solution I was using isn't mature enough to run in this version of Drupal.  I'll either reenable that gallery software when it gets stable or find a new gallery.

While I was waiting for the quilt store to open this morning I wandered into the local thrift store and found yet another baking book: "The Neighborhood Bakeshop" by Jill Van Cleeve. It has "recipes and reminiscences of America's favorite bakery treats" and has a little write-up of each bakery along with the featured recipe. Looks like a good read even if I don't bake from it, A.

I have a confession to make: I've never eaten bagels before. Somehow these dense, naughty creatures have escaped me. Well, until now, that is. I'm not sure what triggered my curiosity; it's probably a toss-up between the exotically low hydration levels in the bagel dough, and the recent US presidential election. Anyways. I leafed through Hamelman's Bread, and found a bagel recipe that looked bulletproof.