Blog posts

Looking for a seasonal specialty for my customers at A&B Naturals, I came upon an Italian Christmas bread, Pinza, that, after crossing the border to Austria, switched holidays - and turned into Easter bread, Pinze.

After a solemn blessing in the church, this lovely Styrian Easter bread (often adorned by a red egg, and cut three times, to symbolize the Holy Trinity) is served with the meat on Easter Sunday.

I have had lots of fun tinkering with this recipe.  Today, I reduced the rye content again, added flax seeds and sprinkled in some sesame seeds.  Still working on my shaping, but the bread was tasty.  My husband really liked it. .

I am coming "home" for the first time since 1990 along with family, and we are hoping to spend a few days in Devon - we lived in Ideford before coming to America. I am hoping some of our English TFL members might be able to recommend a vacation cottage we could rent as a center to explore Devon. There will be five of us, three adults and two teenaged girls, and while I don't mind sharing a room with the girls this old Nana thinks two bathrooms would be nice.  Looking forward to clotted cream, pork pies - and any bakery suggestions would be lovely, A.

This is my version of Pain de Campagne.  It took three attempts before I was satisfied with the result.  The first two loaves were too sour for my liking.  It was only when Josh suggested that I use more starter in my levain build, instead of less, that I finally got the result I wanted.  :)

Levain

A couple months ago I took a Viennoserie class at the San Francisco Baking Institute (SFBI). The students were mostly home baking hobbyists like me, but there were a few professionals too. Most of the 40 hours were spent hands-on in the pastry kitchen. The high quality of instruction combined with the excellent equipment and facilities were totally worth the tuition. The curriculum was designed with a professional production environment in mind so each batch of dough was in the 5-6 kg range and were mixed in large stand mixers. All the lamination was done using a dough sheeter.

It's Frisbee Time

Lucy was so disappointed that the dough stuck to the new basket she decided a re-do was in order since we had the same powerful levain, fierce really, the same flour mixes and nothing but time on our hands

This Easter we are having smoked baby back ribs and smoked chicken with pasta and potato salads, Cole slaw and smoked BBQ beans.  Not our usual Easter fare but that means we needed a good whitish SD bread to replace the usual Wonder Bread that comes with Kansas City, MO  BBQ.

I've been working on the same formula for a while.  I think I'm slowly getting there.

Fresh pesto.

Ready for the freezer and a week's worth of toast.

Happy Easter!

A little bit late but I wanted to tell you about Italy Depot.com where I just bought 5lb of the above flour, shipped free! I checked the site this morning and the price was $12.95, and they have larger sizes and other types. I am anxious to try Roberta's pizza dough since reading the NY Times article posted on TFL and didn't want to buy a huge amount of OO flour. It was securely packed and arrived quickly and the site is easy to cope with. A.