Blog posts

Due to long class hours, my lunch of rice and a viand cannot sustain me until dinner or until I get home. Halfway through the class after lunch, I am already starting to feel drained and lethargic and starting lose focus. Since bagels are a recent favorite and I know how satisfying and filling they are, I baked some to serve as an afternoon snack to fuel me and give some badly needed energy. :)

My first blog entry!

I have been wanting to bake my version of dmsnyder's excellent bread.  I prepared and baked as below, and I am delighted with the result.

I started with my usual 2 loaf sourdough recipe, adjusted the flours and add-in to match dmsnyder's recipe.:

Day 1: 10:00 pm

Prepare levain:

I found pul's bread and was hooked! but persimmon??? ok, I got no persimmon but my wife got fresh kaki and I dryed them cut into wedges. so I have pieces of wedges in the bread and no cubes! never mind! ;-)

this bread is absolut gorgeous!

the loaf shaped as boule

Abel Sierra posted another in his series of fascinating outside-of-the-box things that one can do with just Flour Water and Salt two weeks ago.  And I am indeed fascinated at the breadth of what one can do creatively with just these three ingredients.   And that also meant another that I would warehouse until the time came.  Which was now!

I had bit and pieces of dried fruit leftover from the holidays and I also had some local made grain free spiced granola that I had bought at the farmer’s market. The granola was rather expensive and there wasn’t a lot of it so I added the dried fruit and toasted groats to boost the volume of the add-ins.

So last week I jumped for joy at getting some great spring and 'honeycomb' on my croissants and of course imparted as much of the experience as possible (since that's what TFL is all about ...

The dough is the Tartine Basic Country Bread. The formula of the polenta bread can be found in Tartine Bread (page 93). I added pumpkin seeds, corn oil, fresh rosemary and blue corn polenta instead of the usual variety. It follows a similar approach as the porridge breads in Tartine Book #3 by using a polenta soaker. The soaker was too wet. Nothing that can't be fixed by dehydrating it in the oven until it becomes more like a paste. Another change I made to the Tartine method was an overnight cold retard in the fridge during bulk rise.

the banana rye date and pecan bread made it to the iron skillet this morning! My maple syrup comes from a friends trees in Wisconsin. He taps each Spring. Delicious. 

A fabulous and incredibly informative set of email exchanges on Mariana’s part a few weeks ago had me: