Blog posts

This morning's bake was exactly the same as my last bake of this type:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35521/yw-sweet-levain-boule-forkish-style

The only difference was trying to get my shaping tighter. Getting there, but still needs work. I will give another half loaf away and bake one off again tomorrow. People are always happy to receive my bread and making people happy makes me feel good.

Now that the days start getting colder it is so inviting for a day of baking.

Today I baked some bread for the week. Just one loaf, as I am alone and should not be eating so much bread ( very difficult to keep away from it ). However today I wanted to try my new microwave convection oven baking something. I wanted to see if it was possible to bake using the convection option only. I know that some people use convection oven on a normal bases but I have not read about bread baking and the instruction manual does not say much.

It's been a while since I've used a recipe for bread. Is this something that anyone else does? I know that as a baker, one should not avoid measurements, but sometimes it's just so much faster to throw things together. I would have stopped if I got bad results, but unfortunately, the recipe-less breads are quite nice. 

Two weeks ago, we made some cup cakes and muffins. Techniques like creaming (beating butter and sugar first), and all together were essentially what we used for cupcakes and muffins. Foaming technique was not used here, only for sponge cakes that require no soda or baking powder. This lesson wrapped up the baked goods section, and we were scheduled to start cold and hot desserts next.

I couldn't resist posting today's bake for a couple of reasons.  The first being that this formula has won lots of praise from those for whom I currently bake.  The second reason stems from the fact that it is a result of good old tweaking.  It was inspired by a recent post of hanseata's.  

Yes, baking instructors have homework, too.  And both of this week's bakes are geared to upcoming classes that I will teach at the Culinary Center of Kansas City.

I let nature take its course and instead of scoring the dough, I let the dough tear itself during oven spring- something like the Incredible Hulk's shirt. It saves me the shuffling around looking for my razor blade during that critical oven loading time, not scoring the dough saves me so many motions which- in my modis operandi- is performed like a magicians trick, sleight of hand style.

Ah November... for me, as a mom, this is the one time of year I start to dread all the sugared temper tantrums that are bound to become a regular thing now that the season of non-stop candy and sweets is upon us.

I still want something sweet, but I would rather see all the *sugar, sugar, sugar!* that the kids are bringing home get thrown out, so today I made Guilt-Free Hippie Cookies.

After my first cheese bread success at work (which in fact needed more cooking, but was a success anyway) I decided to get a chorizo bread now.

In this, my third bread, I made some adjustments:

• Increase the oven temp to 220ºC from 150ºC.
• Make sure I put salt! LOL.
• Experiment with steam to get a crust.
• Add more yeast to get more bubbles inside the bread and increase size.

Receipe:

taking into DA's advise finally been able to bake a loaf with a moist and soft crumb. Adding the soak water of long an and goji berries give this bread a sweetness tang.