Blog posts

I baked pitas for lunch today. They were great. I did 1/2 cup of the flour whole wheat, which is 1/6th of the total flour in the recipe. That is just about right for my taste. Making them fit very nicely into my morning schedule: had breakfast, prepared the dough, ran errands while it rose, came home 11:15ish and shaped and baked them. Simple, cheap, and totally rewarding.

After some time, several months, I am finally able to download pictures from my camera to my Linux system. Today I have sent you my first picture from Malaysia. The picture shows our Baguettes, Nutty Mardia Bread, White Unyeasted Bread and some coconut filled buns. The latter are filled with fresh coconut which we buy just up the road from our house. The coconut is split in half and the meat is grated out on a quite vicious machine that you do not want your hands to get near.

I forgot to mention that when I made the Couronne this weekend I found myself without a poolish, something I rarely forget to do. I decided to start one at 8 AM. I used 1 cup whole wheat flour, 1 cup water, and 1/2 teaspoon instant yeast, which is a bit more yeast than I'd do in an overnight pre-ferment.

I tried baking a Couronne this weekend: The bad news: the dough was too slack for me to shape very well, so it didn't turn out terribly pretty. The good news: the slack dough made wonderful bread. Even with a quarter of the flour whole wheat, it was light and airy. We gobbled it up. The recipe was roughly the rustic bread I've baked many times.

I first started playing with sourdough breads a couple of years ago. Unfortunately they did not turn out well although I kept trying for almost a year. This I came across Dan Lepards site (and later this one) and bought his book. I followed his recipe for the levain and after four or five days realised that my previous efforts did not resemble the bubbling mass I now had. My first attempt at the White Loaf was not a success, but I think that was because the climate temperature was around 34 C and I tried to keep to his recipes suggested timings.

After used to having bread for breakfast, i was deprived of my usual breakfast treat when my exams came and my last loaf finished recently. This is what i have to do when i have lil time on my hands. A loaf prepared in 15 minutes!! ..lol Had to make a brown soda bread... too much Soda i think. Affected the taste..haha..or is it suppose to be like tht?..i dunno. The people in the place where i live only calls white fluffy, sweet - cake liked things as bread. They would term all my breads as alien...

I finally started to do the little trick of holding back a cup of flour out of the recipe and using it as I knead. The dough has a much better hydration. I am so used to cooking and baking very rapidly and always trying to organize for speed. Now its time to organize to achieve the bread's best potential. Slowly stepping it up to the next level. I also decided to hold off on my starter. I want to thoroughly understand yeast breads first from the ground up-literally. Flat breads first. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll build my Wood Fired Oven....but not too far!

Apart from the fact that most of us eat Peanut Butter on Bread. This has not much to do with Bread. A few months ago I made some Peanut Butter just to see how it would turn out. It was good so I made some more and gave sample to our Organic shop. They loved it and now I am having a job keeping up with the demand. It is sold in all 5 outlets of the Organic store. The bottle-neck is in peeling the peanuts. We did try using ready-peeled nuts but it was not the same.

Firefox users: click here if you want to download a Fresh Loaf search plug-in. On that page, you click on the title "The Fresh Loaf". It'll install a little search plug-in. Then you can go up to your search box and click on the logo to switch engines. The Fresh Loaf icon looks like this: The Fresh Loaf search always at your finger tips... what more could you ask for?!?

Its 10:26 AM and I have just finished Baking. I started at 04:30. Shortly my wife and I will be off to deliver our bread to an Organic Shop we bake for. Three years ago we started baking in a small shop. We had the idea of baking healthy wholegrain bread. Boy were we wrong. Mostly we just got complaints about how hard the bread was. I have to say that in Malaysia bread is very very very soft and fluffy.