Blog posts

How do you master any given skill? Practice. Thousands of hours of work. Analysis of failures, and successes too.

Toward that end, my own personal self-imposed challenge for 2017 will be to bake at least 50 loaves of bread (hopefully more), documenting and photographing each one. I'll post the successes and also the failures here in this blog. I hope that by doing so, I'll be a better baker at the end of 2017 than I was at the start of 2017.

For my New Year's Eve bake? Pull, vat else! Hey I am working on my braiding technique and bake one of these a week. Also a chance to wish all my fresh loaf friends greetings, best wishes, health, health, happiness, interesting times and great baking! I also have a loaf of high hydration sanny bread on the go to balance things.

This is my yard sourdough before. I just gave it a nicer name, "Bakuran" means yard in Filipino and I called it that way because all of the influences of this bread came from our Bakuran. It is my best and favorite bread this year so I made another batch before new year. In the whole 2016, I haven't made a bâtard so before the year ends I shaped my favorite breads into bâtards!

I built my levain in 3 builds, it was very active and triples in 4 hours! This levain is literally escaping out of its house!

I was in my building's management office on Wed. afternoon.  The building's Chief Engineer said that he had to discuss something serious with me.  "I want you to make me another one of those olive breads" he said with all seriousness.  Who was I to refuse?  "Baguette or batard?"  "Baguette." "See you on Friday" was my reply.

415g x 4 baguettes

The formula:

Notes:

Baking December, 2016

Before I got into making bread by hand, this is the bread that I made in the bread machine. The original recipe is for a 1.5 lb loaf from the CD Kitchen website. I played with it adjusting the quantities for a 2 lb loaf since that is the minimum size loaf for the bread machine I have.

My daughter requested that I make this for Xmas dinner. So this weekend's bake was not very exciting. I did make 3 of these loaves for the soup kitchen as well. 

One of the all-time favorite recipes here on TFL is the Blueberry Cream Cheese Braid that Floyd posted clear back in 2005.  If you haven't yet, or haven't recently, read that post and the long string of comments that follow, I suggest that you have a look.  There are a lot of good ideas in that thread.

Christmas Eve, I tried baking a loaf in the wood stove again, having learned a lot from Take 1. Same basic set up, with a few key changes. One, I waited until the coals had died down a bit more than the first try. Two, I used a 6-inch Fat Daddios cake pan inside the cast iron pot, and proofed the loaf in this as a bread pan.