Blog posts

hello all!

Since my last post, my microbakery business was uprooted along with much of my life. It's a blurry spectrum of crisis, growth and rebuilding, but if my returning passion for bread is any indicator, life is much better these days. 

My beau is quite the fermenting aficionado and has a great interest in beer, traditionally prepared food, etc. We've been watching Michael Pollan's Cooked lately, and made it to the bread episode and he was thrilled and wanted to learn the ropes from me.

Had a bunch of errands to run this weekend, and not a lot of time to prep for a bake--- perfect time to make some pita. It's 100% whole grain wheat flour, tastes great.

...there was Lacey. She's about a month old. 

Lacey, the starter, isn't all that strong or robust at the moment. Shes not sick, but a few days ago there was more CO2 production and visible muscle-like tension as the wooden spoon would stir her around.

I used most of her to make a few loaves of bread, then fed her, which was 34 hours ago. I've stirred her every twelve hours since then. Still trying to grow back to potential.

She was captured with 1:1 AP and water, then fed whole wheat and bread flour. She has gone back to AP, then switched back to 50/50 WW&BF.

I made Bag-End Levain for the bread shop yesterday. I did end up with one loaf left (it's in the freezer now) so if no one buys it I will slice it and post photos of the crumb (and comment on the taste). For now though, I'm happy the way it turned out. One never knows with dumping in whatever comes to hand!

This one had a blend of flours:

The blueberry cream cheese bread and it's variants are one of my favourite breads to both bake and eat. After baking  the original blueberry, cream cheese formula last week, but using only 253 grams of pulla dough, I found I liked the ratio of fruit filling to dough better than the original recipe.

This bread is the result of not having a good idea of what I was looking to achieve this week and a bunch of diversions and distractions. When gathering things to sprout and an interruption I ended up with three grains without the gluten proteins (rice, barley and millet) and some great northern beans don't know what or if I was thinking at the time.

Hello and happy easter to all!

Thanks to every one who commented last week on how to make my scoring better, this weeks bake has a much smoother look to it, which is what I wanted.

And the crumb shot...

Hot Cross Buns from Hamelman's Bread - simple and simply delicious.

Our favourite

Juergen

My boyfriend and I love dense, chewy cookies. I know that there are various ways to go about creating a dense, flavorful cookie, but I wanted a cookie with ultimate moisture, texture, and flavor.

Well, I did pose the question the other day about converting a Polish babka to sourdough (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/45314/converting-babka-recipe-sourdough)

Anyways, I took the plunge, tweaked the original yeasted recipe (upping the salt from a pinch to 2%) and here goes...

Ingredients:

Levain:

30g 100% hydration wholegrain rye starter

50g strong white bread flour

125ml whole milk

Dough:

All of the levain