Blog posts

Today I made my first baguettes. I have shied away from the intimidating baguette - the shaping, the proofing, the scary, scary slashing! But I have made enough boules, batards, and rolls to gain confidence in my skills. I am quite pleased with my first attempt. Like all things baking, improvement will come with experience and practice. The recipe is from Hamelman's Bread: Baguettes with Pate Fermentee. While the crumb is not as open as it should be, the flavor is delicious and the texture light and airy.

It's kickoff week for the Inside the Jewish Bakery Challenge - Semester 1. We're starting off with Mohn bars.

The bars are made up of three sub-recipes: 1-2-3 dough, a poppyseed filling, and streusel on the top. I used KA bread flour instead of home milled this time.

Baking notes:

Light Pain au Levain; “Rossisky”using the Auerman Three Stage Process.

Yesterday I stoked up the wood-fired oven first thing, as I had around 8.5kg of dough retarded in my fridge, and a ripe Rye “Sponge”, ready to use to make a Pullman Pan loaf of high-rye bread.

Last week 's bake was a single loaf  sourdough  with hazel and walnuts

Cake zoo.
I love my animals and thus reflect this.
There are a lot of animals and animal lovers in our family too.
Like to bake animal figurines is the joy of kids!
They are our animals!

This is an 83% rye bread with a whole and chopped rye soaker and leavened with a ginger beer barm. As part of the total hydration it includes water that has been infused with fresh ginger to lend an accent of fresh ginger throughout the bread.

Ginger/water infusion

My last chocolate experiment was a bit (allright, a large bit) too sweet. This time, I eliminated the extra butter, brown sugar, and maple syrup, and went with 2 oz of bittersweet choc chips and 2 oz of milk choc chips. I added 5 oz of dried cherries and 4 oz of pecans. I also used 100% home-milled flour (mix of hard red and white wheat) and the sourdo.com Russian starter. After an initial 4 hour proof, I shaped and put in a pullman pan.

I've been wanting to learn how to cook and bake certain things for a while -- especially bread -- and I finally did it. I made one loaf yesterday that came out rather doughy on the inside, hard crust, and even harder bottom crust. Here are the things I think I did wrong with it: