Blog posts

I can't help it. I'm so proud of my son's first bread. A month ago, I visited them for Thanksgiving and left him with some of my sourdough starter. I baked once while there, with Joel watching. Yesterday, he made his first on his own San Joaquin Sourdough.

I aske Joel how it tasted. He said, "Kind of like yours. Great."

Not too shabby, eh?

According to Floyd's clock, it has been exactly a year since I emerged from lurkdom @ TFL.  So it's a good day to thank our gracious and attentive host for his hospitality at The Loafers' Inn, and as well to thank Floyd's far-flung guests who have enlivened and enriched my bread journey so generously over the past twelve months.

Stollen is one of my favourite Xmas breads, in fact all breads.

Not surprising given my fondness for fruit, cherries and marzipan….

Not fond of dark rum though…a tipple of white rum, yes!!

Sublime…

Just gorgeous with Marzipan

What's fun about working with natural yeast is that I can throw together anything and just play around.So I just watched a couple of videos on bagels, and made 4 bagels of my own.The photos are from my phone, so they're not very clear.

A neighbor and I have a 15 year old tradition of exchanging baked goods at this time of year. His wife always bakes a delicious rum and nutmeg-flavored cake, and I give them a loaf of bread. This year, my gift was a 1.5 kg loaf of Hamelman's pain au levain. 

They say "fences make good neighbors," but I think exchange of fresh-baked goodies does too.

For the holidays, I decided to move away from the typical four ingredients and go with somethimg richer.  I remembered that when I was perusing the BBA book, I found a recipe that caught my eye - Portuguese Sweet Bread.  I hope you enjoy some of the pics tha I took along the way.  The bread turned out great, even though I was missing some of the key ingredients, like shortening and lemon and orange extracts.

The traditional holiday meal on California’s North Coast consists of Sourdough Bread, Fresh Dungeness Crab and White Wine.  By family demand, I made some San Francisco Country Sourdough for the Crab feast.  It was the best I’ve ever made. 

Ihe been 6 weeks since we wrapped up the stollen in a cotton tea towel and put it on teh back patio to age gracefully in a tin here:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/30996/not-so-stollen

and here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/31088/not-so-stollen-thanksgiving-take

Our take on Breadsong’s fabulous Christmas Rose was to make it Green with basil pesto and Red with home made sun dried tomatoes.  We used our combo yeast water, rye sour and Desem sourdough starters with our 30% whole gain multi-grain mix of Kamut, dark rye, spelt and whole wheat.