Blog posts

Sometimes, I think, it's best to start telling a story by jumping to the end. Especially when that story is still alive and unfolding.

It's Sunday morning and the bakery is open once again. On the sunlit shelves lie gently whispering baguettes,  butter laden pastries and warm, plain loaves.  Sunday bread.  Bread to make you feel good inside and sprinkle a touch of nostalgia over your long, lazy breakfast.

Through the open door to the street outside waft the irrestible scents of the ovens offering.

People fall in haphazardly. 

Here were my weekend bakes. I took these to a picnic—one loaf sliced up, the other given to the host. I'm incredibly pleased with the way these came out. Everything from the crumb to the crust to the color was ace in my book.

One of the great things about this site is the volume of great recipes to try. One of my favourites is Norm's onion buns:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/6245/another-one-norm-onion-rolls

My two key changes were using a liquid levain and upping the hydration to about 68% The dough hydration as written would be not workable at my elevation and I hand mix all my breads, so no big mixer to help.

  I've been meaning to make a version of Dave Snyder's famous San Joaquin bread.  I baked some baguettes last week using the modified formula below but without the onions and they tasted great.  For this bake I decided to add some grilled onions and shape some batards.

I used KAF French style flour in place of the AP flour in the original formula and increased the amount of rye and whole wheat also using fresh milled rye and fresh milled sprouted whole wheat.  I added some fresh milled Durum flour as well.

Next up was making baguettes based on Ken's Artisan Bakery's Country Brown batards and boules.  The other day I did the same to his bakery's Country Blonde.  Not much to add except that I'm in the midst of a tear for getting batard and boule formats squeezed into baguettes.  Must be an affliction, Doc.

This week I was going to try to explain Lucy’s plan to save all of us from the Sun going naturally smoking hot  in 500,000 years and toasting us into wishing we were pop tarts instead of lazy.  But, things happen, and we are off on another totally different track.  Let’s face it 500,000 years is a ways off so we can concentrate on something else a little more pressing.... like human caused, global warming – even if it is totally fake or not.

hi the freshloafers,

I make this marbled rye bread purely for its aesthetic value.  Its made with a dark and light whole rye/ wheat mixed dough.  A great little bread to serve for brunch.  It does also taste very nice!  for details, photos and instructions to get that great swirl effect follow me back to mybreadandbrot.

http://mybreadandbrot.com/marbled-rye-bread/

This is part of my experiments with home milled whole wheat and rye berries.

I used about 400 grams of whole wheat flour and 300 grams of rye flour which I sifted after milling grains at home.

1) Used sifted out large parts to feed my wheat and rye starter, three times/builds before using the starter.

2) Autolyzed flour for 24 hours, room temp.

3) Combined flour and starter from the fridge, and about 15 grams of maple syrup. Total hydration was about 75% at this point.

Continuing on my quest to reverse boule and batard formulae to baguettes, here is my take on Ken's Artisan Bakery's country blonde.  But instead of as boules or batards, which is what he sells them as, I fashioned them into baguettes (and a batard).  

Almost, but not quite as compliant as my take on the Hamelman WW levain baguettes and batards, it falls short on both looks and shaping.  But only by a few fat hairs.  The Hamelman's have an incredible delicate finish to them.

I first saw this bread about a year ago in this video by chowhound  where Alex Van Buren had it at Rhong-Tiam, a Thai restaurant in New york. I made a lot of research and found out that it is a very popular street food in Thailand. It has very interesting ingredients and technique and looks very delicious, I knew I have to make it but I did not have the guts to try until last Saturday.