Blog posts

Managing the Water

Greetings from Finland!

After years of reading your posts (and drooling over your tasty and beautiful loaves) for inspiration, I thought I'd start my own blog here too. During the days I'm a stay-at-home dad exploring life with my two boys (ages 4.6 and 2 :)). The rest of my time, mostly when my family is asleep, I try to split between baking, writing and some other creative experiments. And browsing The Fresh Loaf.

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Over the weekend, I finally worked up the courage to try making Bruno's Pandoro from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking. I followed the the formula almost exactly. The one thing I changed was to replace all of the whole eggs in the formula with an equal amount of egg yolks by weight. I had the idea in my mind that this would give the final product better color and flavor (more on this later).

I’ve had a few months break from baking – having a little one takes a lot of your time!! No matter how many people tell you, you won’t know till it actually happens to you.

 Anywho, the little monkey is asleep and I can update my blog with the recent bakes, got a bit of a backlog to get through.

 Today’s post is about lemon cupcakes – I know its not bread, but its baking, so I figured that its worth blogging about - link here.

I mostly prefer straight breads, but had some ricotta that was left over and in danger of souring, so decided on a whim to add it to a bread dough I've been baking a lot lately, along with some fried onion. The result knocked my socks off!

Pane de Campagne with Red Fife 75% sifted and Rye Bread with Barley 

German Style-Many Seed Bread

When Hanseata posted her last bread of the year, it was a reminder of a recipe I have seen in Peter Rhinehart’s “Whole Grain Breads”. I hadn't made this one yet but it looks like it has promise. Actually, I love this book. Peters “Epoxy or pre dough” method is inspired. The need for less kneading during the final dough mix delivers delicious results every time. I get rave reviews on all the breads I bake from WGB.

This is completely off-topic.

Discounting the ocassional hurricane, and the ever increasing summer heat, Florida is a good state to live in, especially if you grow a winter garden. We generally plant cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli in late October to early November. The broccoli is always the first to mature.

I've been wrestling with producing a 50% Whole Wheat sourdough loaf that has good flavor and an open, chewy crumb. I've described my difficulties, and, finally a successful attempt in: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/25804/whole-wheat-sunday

I won't repeat the details here, but I'll summarize what I've learned. I believe the comments are relevant to all lean  dough sourdough breads to some extent, but the degree of importance may vary depending on the flours used.

Sending this toYeastspotting.
Click here for my blog index.

Continuing with my obession for laminated dough...