Blog posts

After reading Reinhart's various and sundry compliments of the Poilane style, I thought it would be interesting to give it a try.

I made half of a batch ... I may post a crumb shot later today. The flavor is nice, but the crumb is very tight. You might see in the pic that there was some oven spring but not all that much ... I'm sure some of that is because WW is less extensible than breads based on white flours, but I'm fairly certain that some of it has to do with hydration.

I have been taking a Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Bread class on Craftsy and these loaves are from the rustic bread lesson. Craftsy is an online learning platform for a wide range of subjects such as knitting, baking & cooking, weaving, crochet, quilting, and much more.

So in tradition, to 'close the kitchen' for this year before the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, I decided to bake two loaves of sourdough boules.

Straight forward recipe of starter, water, flour and salt. 12 hour fermentation, shaping and into the oven it went!

Pretty good close to the year right?

Between sips of the left over home brewed stout, the Haloumi cheese cbes and diced onions were folded into the Turmeric douh over  three intervals of stretch and bench rests before being shaped and dropped into foil containers that allows for easy transportation as they were to be baked on our own the next day.

With drinks drained very quickly from the plastc cups, Derek then got busy with a quick rise white bread with black sesame  which was  eventually shaped into  numerous shapes and sprinkled with not only black sesame but white sesame and poppy seeds.

  Ever since I received my new toy I've become obsessed with using freshly milled flour in my bread baking.  Since I was traveling last week for a job interview I didn't have any time to bake until this weekend so I refreshed my mother starter, created a levain using some of the refreshed starter and just to see what would happen, I added some sour cream in place of some of the water to make the levain.

Howdy y'all this is my first post on TFL but I've been following this site for almost a year now and it has helped a lot with my endeavors in yeast as I am very much still a novice. Anywho this is a 70 % hydration sourdough (If my math is correct) incorporating 36% whole wheat and a soaker composed of bran and flax seed meal. the taste is quite nice with the nuttiness of the soaker not overpowered by the sour despite an 18 hour retard. Here's the formula, I welcome any suggestions/advice.

315 g H2O room temp

162 g whole wheat flour

Had to make some muffins today to share with friends.  I usually make them with sourdough, but didn't today.  It's a good recipe; I added the toasted almonds to it because I always love muffins with both fruit and nuts. I got the blood oranges from the farmer's market on Sunday.

Saw this video and thought i must share.. first time i see how a dough can be strech to cover the entire table!!

http://www.mercotte.fr/videos-cuisine-et-cuisiniers/

Happy Baking!

I sliced a loaf from mondays bake in half and discovered a hole big enough to park the 2CV in. I was after large holes but not quite to this degree. I've since cut into another loaf from the batch, it was much tamer.

Last year i had permission to hold a promotional class consisting of colleagues family and friends with the idea that fellow TFL member Ross (ROSS-N-ROLLER) would come along and do an article that we could submit to the local paper  prior to a November date for a class on Sour Dough.

Ross and his partner Janice  came along and we had a great evening together.

Ross's article follows