Today, I made a tiny little leap to no where in particular by teaching a small class to make bagels. Since people (including me) had limited time I did a few practice rounds, taking note of the times, so we could fit in everything, including a potluck lunch, into a 2 hour period.
The Bread Baker's Guild of America has a recommended format for publishing bread formulas.
I'll post later on more functional aspects of the format.
My new 'Wellness Mat' I ordered it from Amazon.com. OMG...why didn't I get one of these earlier. I'm loving it. They are expensive but sooo worth it...check out all the pluses on this mat. I sometimes stand all day long in the kitchen. What relief this mat provides. I couldn't be more pleased. I ordered the 2x6 and it lays across my sink and L shaped baking area perfect. No more tired legs.
I recently asked TFL how to score Richard Bertinet's Pain aux Olives to achieve the effect shown in his book, Dough: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/keyword/bread-scoring-score-richard-bertinet-pains-gourmands-2006-larousse-olive-bread
I made a version of it this weekend, and they were right: It's rolled and the scored on the vertical.
My series of San Francisco-style sourdough bread bakes has featured several variations of levain elaboration, leaving the final dough ingredients and procedures essentially constant. Today's variation involved using a firm starter to activate the stock starter and building the stiff levain which is mixed in the final dough in three steps, rather than two. In addition, rather than retarding an intermediate build, I retarded the stiff levain.
