Blog posts

Like many here, I imagine, I like to try lots of different breads in amongst my rolling repertoire of regulars. I've been doing more new ones than regulars lately, but had a sudden urge to revisit one of my old favourites: Gérard Rubaud's bread, which Shiao-Ping brought to the attention of TFLers some time ago in a spectacular bake that was essentially her homage to GR: see here.

I suppose it is rather funny to be making homemade sourdough bread and never having eaten any of it before.  I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be comparing it to.  I was in the San Francisco airport this time last year and saw everyone advertising their sourdough bread and wondered what was so special about it.  I didn't buy any!  What a dummy!

DRY INGREDIENTS

I think I'll post these here, and then start a new "Ugly Loaf" thread in the General forum.  It seems I'm always posting loaves I'm proud of because they look nice (to me), so it is time to admit I'm human.  Really, really human.

I mentioned in a post about a week ago I'd been laid up for seven weeks, unable to walk more than ten steps, let alone bake bread. The last four days I've been baking sourdough--two variations of the base 45%/45%/10%:Bread Flour/AP Flour/Whole Rye Flour; 68% Hyd., and 28% prefermented Bread Flour in the sourdough starter--nothing fancy, nothing new but just being able to bake leaves me humble and grateful once again I can.

My friend and former neighbor Big Al loves to cook. He gave us one of his Focaccia masterpieces a couple of years ago and it was so good I convinced him to show me how to make it. Big Al isn't into measuring much (never mind weighing to the gram like me!), but he got me started with ingredients and his process.

Green tea and red bean are the food pair that I love.  The bitterness from green tea complements the sweetness from the red bean paste really well. I have the left over of red bean paste I made for my homemade green tea ice cream last week. I have a big container of it and I don't like to see them going to waste. So, it makes a perfect timing to get on baking some green tea bread buns.