Blog posts

It is a bit less than a month till May the 5th but we will celebrate on May the 4th a Saturday instead.  That way folks that come into from out of town  can fly in in Friday after work and fly home on Sunday 

I live in a lake community called the Islands in Gilbert and there is a community park right next to the lake with Pavilions where we can stretch out,  I'm checking to see if we can have wine and beer outdoors or we will have to have it at my house next to the pool.  

It

I got to take a great class with Sarah Owens yesterday. I learned many new things. It was grand to hang out with other bread geeks for a few hours.

I keep making much to much starter and my fridge has been littered with glasses and jars of left over starter. I had one left to use up and this is what came out.  I had 100 grams of starter that hadn't been fed in a week and no plan. It kind of all worked out. I fed it 1:1:1 and then added another 600 g of water and 800g of unbleached bread flour as that's all I have in the house right now. Based on last week's bake and the impact oat bran had on creating a soft crumb I decided to add some steel cut oats to this bread.

I was checking out my bookmarks to see what to make next and Antony Power’s Irish Stout, oats and cheddar cheese sourdough really appealed to me. I scaled it for 3 loaves, used a bit more whole grain, added a bit of yogurt and changed the method to follow my usual procedure. I hope it turns out as well as his.

Soaker

180 g oats

300 g stout beer (Sawdust City Skinny Dippin' Stout)

Dough

720 g Unbleached flour 

200 g high extraction (sifted) Selkirk wheat flour (270 g Selkirk berries)

The one thing I don’t like about whole grain bread is that it’d never be as chewy as white bread. That’s why I thought of putting springy fishcakes into the bread for added texture. Please hear me out before you turn away from this nonsense: fishcakes bread isn’t as strange as it might sound!

Rus Brot's blog post about red rye malt, and Rus Brot's Youtube instructions 

My fellow baker and good friend A.K.A. "Yippee" from The Fresh Loaf site has been gracious enough to mail me several loaves of her awesome bread as well as some other goodies.  It was high time I shared some of my bread with her.  It's taken me longer than it should have, but I needed to figure out how to get the bread to the post office since I leave my house to go into the city every day very early.

This loaf is destined for my living longer living stronger  keep fit class tomorrow morning. My wife gave me some rosemarie  sprigs that she broke off whilst re potting her Gallipoli Rosemarie, i was to see if i could get them to strike.I had a fair few leaves from the preparation that i subsequently chopped up and decided to add them to a loaf,  and this is the result. Its a dried yeast loaf with 10% potato 5 % carrot and 1% Chopped Rosemarie.

Right, so I've just gotten out of my baby stages of baking.  I personally had several questions throughout my learning process.  You probably have some too if you're looking at this forum.  I thought it would be helpful for newer bakers to get some quick answers from a person who has had to ask the same questions they may have.  This is a simple, no frills post.  This is for United States, and it does not attempt to retread old ground that has likely been covered before with other guides.  I'm not going to tell you what scale to get, or what book will

 My wife and I like porridge for breakfast.  The porridge always includes oats, nuts, and fruit but otherwise it is not really constrained, and I am always looking for ideas. Recently I picked-up  Bob’s Red Mill 10-grain Breakfast cereal, but it was not really a winner – we did not really like the texture, so I ground it into flour for my Pain de Campania series.

It made a surprisingly good addition to my Pain de Campania.  It was worth thinking deeply about.