Blog posts

Waiting for bread to cool before slicing is an exercise in restraint and one at which I usually fail.  Not this time and it paid off.  So pleased!  A creamy, cool, light interior despite the heavy ingredients of soaked seeds, fruit and nuts.  I went full throttle on heat and was nervous that I'd burned the bread, but I had not. The burnished crust was just perfect for my preference.  My husband is sitting next to me eating a hunk as I type this and he JUST said, "Mmm mmm gooood."  Recipe & pics attached.  Happy baking!

I’ve been meaning to bake a bread with potatoes in it, and I got some great tips from Isand66 and Dabrownman last week for potato bread , i thought why not start with a sweet potato loaf.

My formula is based on a recipe by txfarmer "Sweet potato sourdough with walnuts" . 

I had such a good bake with my one previous turn at David's SFBI Pain au Levain (my way!) , a mostly all AP flour dough, that I knew I'd be returning to the scene of the crime soon enough.  Again using my 75% hydration levain and adding water to make up for the difference vs. a liquid levain, I also decided to add caraway seeds to the dough.  A good slather of cornstarch glaze before and after the bake.

Lucy isn’t known to be a died in the wool bread traditionalist and I am anything, and everything, a bit strange in an odd and slightly weird way since being born 2nd to my twin and losing the first race I ever ran.  Being a born loser can wear on you over time, if you let it, so you might tend to compensate by being a rebel and not give much, if any, respect to the establishment, rules and the status quo.

Well I haven't posted in more than a month, but have been busy baking different things. The dinner rolls are a take of P. Reinharts soft pull apart dinner rolls from ABED.  This batch of 325 grams total flour yielded 6 rolls at 104 grams each, so I thought why not bake them off in a muffin tin?

All of the my bakes are leavened with a refreshed liquid levain. Here is the formula for the rolls:

50 g levain

325 g bread flour

175 g milk, scalded

After waiting literally many years to bake my own bread I finally did it. Thank to Jim Lahey's no knead recipe which I followed to the letter this bread came out wonderful and was very tasty and delicious!

Nothing new and exciting baking here this week, except my wife's French Plum Crisp. I baked a couple of my go to breads. My version of Forkish's Pain de Campagne, very different from his, actually. I do use his baking procedure, although it's really Chad Robertson's. Oh, well. It makes really good, crusty bread.

  Fresh milled Spelt flour and Rye along with rye chops, cracked wheat and barley flakes were left to autolyse for 24 hours.  The resulting bread was an earthy, nutty wholesome bread perfect for sandwiches, grilled bread or just spread with some butter.

Well this was almost a bust! I am not sure what happened but my bread didn't rise very much at all. I thought it might have been that the alcohol in the cider killed the yeast but there are sourdough recipes out there done with hard cider. This was on top of messing up the hydration when I realized I was short 65 g of levain and took some of my stiff starter from the fridge and added water to it. So this is not a true 1-2-3 sourdough. This is what I did.