Blog posts

Almost 9 months since I began my sourdough starter, and I finally feel like I'm getting a teeny bit of a handle on this, which I say joyfully but cautiously.

Yesterday, I baked a couple loaves of my version of the Pain de Campagne from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast. I increase the whole wheat flour proportion and also substitute some medium rye for AP flour. And then, of course, my timing of the various steps is quite different from Forkish's. Anyway, it's really good bread.

 I also made a couple loaves of San Francisco-style Sourdough with dried sour cherries and toasted hazelnuts. I used Forkish's standard levain for both of these breads.

This CTC (Clean The Cupboard) loaf was created to use up some grains and take advantage of the oven-dried tomatoes from the days big harvest.

The formula was something like this:

• 100g farro
• 100g WW flour
• 400g Bread flour
• 150g white flour levain - mild 100% H
• 150g rye flour levain - sour 100%H
• unknown quantity of oven-dried tomatoes and grated parmesan.
• sesame and chia seeds

Was really delicious and with additional oven-dried tomatoes slathered on was a meal in itself.

I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow TFL baker during my trip to the UK from California.  I had noticed last year on TFL that Peter (blueboy2419) baked some impressive breads with beer and mentioned a beer festival that he volunteers at every year in Liverpool, my husband’s home town.  More than a year ago, I found out that we would be in town for the beer festival, as we were going to be in the UK for my niece’s wedding.  Peter gave me information on the festival, and I bought tickets.

That was today's bake. Only one loaf, because I did go a little crazy on Friday.

2014 Dabrownman’s TFL Blog Index

1/1/2014 - New Year’s Panettone - 2014

1/3/2014 - YW SD Spelt and White Whole Wheat Miche

1/5/2014 -  Saturday Night Pizza - 1/4/2014

Our half pie / half crisp Apple New Year's Pie is made with a short crust bottom and a crisp top made with 1/3 C each almond granola, oats, sugar, flour and 4 T butter with some salt and pumpkin pie spices about 1/8th tsp each..

This is my first post ever, though I have been consulting the site for quite a while now. So hi, everybody, I'm glad to be here and hope to be a part of this awesome baking community!

This is a sourdough loaf with whole grain wheat, rye and oat flour, with chocolate and cranberries.

I have always been interested in baking but I do not own an oven at home. Occasionally, I would borrow my neighbour's small oven to bake small cakes like cupcakes, muffins and etc. However, I'm more interested in baking bread than cake, most probably because I prefer eating bread over cake. Without a proper oven, no matter how much I wanted to try and get started on bread baking, I guess it was quite impossible. Besides, I barely had time back then to bake often so buying an oven to place in my space constrained kitchen didn't seem like such a good investment.