Blog posts

  After the nice and hearty apple cider walnut rye bread I baked I needed something a little lighter.  This bake with durum, spelt, cream cheese and baby purple potatoes that I roasted the night before was just the ticket.  The cream cheese and potatoes really made for a nice soft and moist crumb.

You can see the pretty purple bits of potato sticking out of the crumb and the nice nutty flavors of the spelt and durum really make this one worth baking again.

just a bit of an article that might interest members in the Phnom Penh Post

Phnom Penh Post - The prodigal baker returns, and he’s brought along some fresh ideas

It was my daughter's baby shower on the weekend, and I made good old spinach dip. Of course, you need to put it in a sourdough bread bowl, right? So I added one 123 sourdough boule to the weekend bake. It turned out to be so good, I'm making smaller bread bowls (or boules, if they don't want them for holding soup!) for the subscription list customers for Wednesday. Nice creamy open gelatinized crumb, but I didn't get a crumb shot because I hollowed it out at the shower and it was devoured!

Sometimes it's nice to get back to basics. :)

A quick bread made with a bottle of dark stout, 50/50 wholewheat flour and bread flour and yeast. The dough was too soft for a freeform loaf and while digging for a loaf pan, I found my plum pudding mould and dumped the dough into that instead. I rather like the shape.

I got my inspiration for this bread from Cedar Mountain's Khorasan Spelt Seeded Bread. I was totally impressed with the crumb and look of that bread and decided to make something similar with the flours and seeds I had in the house. 

I have I have been continuing to pursue my study of 1-2-3 bread. I had some extra pureed blueberries I though would go well in bread. They did except for the one loaf that stuck to the bottom of the pan, so I ate some and it was addictive and cut up the rest and froze it, for stuffing or maybe even croutons. The other loaf might have been a bit under proofed.

Loose dough on silipat

       This is a great fall bread made with apple cider, rye flour and lots of walnuts.  If you don't like walnuts you can certainly leave them out or cut  down on the amount used which was quite a bit.

I really like the combination of flavors in this one.  I ended up with a little more of a bold bake than I would have liked but it tastes great.

It has been a while since I have baked something from Inside the Jewish Bakery -- too long.  Beigle or Hungarian filled rolls as described in the book are still one of the BEST things I have ever taken out of my oven!

Walnut and almond you say? Well I made a 1/4 batch of walnut filling and it was only good to cover half of the rolled out dough. Out of walnuts, I made a second batch of filling using almonds, so the inner part is walnut and the outer rolls almond. YUMMY!!!

This was my first pizza using Italian 00 flour. It was noticeably more slack and extensible than the strong bread flour I am used to working with. Boy did it make great pizza crust! Home made tomato gravy topped with fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, Hungarian salami, (my favourite!), prosciutto and Reggiano parmigiana.  Great pizza!  I need to start another dough batch.

Total recipe was 350 g flour @ 73% hydration.  I used 50g liquid levain, 30g durham semolina and 295g 00 flour, and 7g salt.

Just wanted to show off my successful new slashing style!

Sourdough boule - Starter 785 g, water 245 g, bread flour 545 g, sea salt 17 g - knead 5 min with dough hook, rest 5 min, knead 5 min with dough hook, shape, rest 20 min, reshape, rise in frig ~ 20 hours, slash, 30 min 450 degrees, 20 min 400 degrees... try not to cut into until done cooling on rack