Blog posts

SD Psomi after Greenstein's "Psomi Bread"

On page 151-153 of Greenstein's “Secrets of a Jewish Baker,” there is a recipe for what he calls “Psomi Bread.” He says he had this from a bakery in New Hampshire and made his own version. His formula is as follows (The weights are my estimates. Greenstein only provides volume measurements.):

Sponge (150% hydration)

I am slowly getting ready for Farmers Market.  Still cooking in my home.  The commercail kitchen is still a couple of weeks away.  I have five different sourdough breads, three different flour blends.

Using Peter Reinhart's Pain au Levain, morph some into Pain ausx herbes provance using Panzy's Herb de Provence blend.

Using Peter's San Francisco recipe I use Gérard Rubaud flour blend.  Some of it morphs into a multigrain using 3/4 King Arthurs Harvest Blend and 1/4 extra poppy seeds.

I also made Reinhart's Whole Wheat sourdough.

Definitely the best but most rich cinnamon buns I have ever had. Used Suas' croissant formula, then I threw together some cinnamon sugar and cinnamon icing.

There are, at least, two threads running currently whose subjects deal with "the past'":

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/18072/primitive-cooking-techniques-amp-discussions

and,

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/18097/fredk-t-vine

I'm feeding my levain tonight, plan on baking on Sunday ...for real this time.  My wife and I are going out for dinner tomorrow since it's our 6th anniversary.  That would conflict with a late afternoon Saturday baking, so I'll bake for sure on Sunday and probably also on Monday to get caught up with The Bread Challenge.  Sunday will be Hamelmans Whole Wheat Bread w/pate fermentee and Monday will be his whole wheat bread with soaker.  I'm looking forward to trying a soaker since I haven't tried that method yet

When I bake baguettes, they are coming out too dark on the bottom, too light on top.  I have a baking stone in the floor of my oven (GE Profile gas) and I place the loaves in the perforated baguette trays in the middle of the oven.  Also, the thermometer I place inside the oven reads a lower temperature than what the digital oven temperature indicator says, by anywhere from 25 to 50 degrees. 

I left home on Feb 19th to ride across the US on my bicycle. I started in St. Augustine FL on Feb 26th and  I completed the ride on April 28th in San Diego CA. It was a wonderful time of hard work and fun and finding out how strong I am in lots of different ways. I was doing this to raise awareness of hunger in this country and called my ride Pedaling for Food. My local food bank was the recipient of all the money and food that was donated locally . They placed bins in the local Kroger stores and at my Golds gym. The local newspaper wrote up my ride and helped to increase awareness .

I had a visit by a rep from my wholesaler, Downeast Food Distributors, who left a sample of a new gluten free bake mix to test some bread and pastry recipes. It consists of a mixture of rice flour, potato starch, sugar, salt and 5 different gums plus methylcellulose. This chemical array is necessary to enable the bread to rise at all and not fall apart.

These rings (based on the recipe for 'Greek Sesame Galettes (Κουλούρια)' in "Mediterranean Street Food" by Anissa Helou) were baked in the barbecue.

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It was hot in the kitchen. It was noon. But I mixed the dough anyway. And because it was so ridiculously hot , it was ready to be baked by dinnertime. We baked the rings in the barbecue.