Blog posts

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to "take it up a level."   I had hit the wall on getting properly shaped and slashed naturally leavened loaves.    LindyD's recent post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam on generating steam set off a lightbulb in my head.  The symptoms I have been trying to cure are cuts that open a little and then seal over, and a split side.   I had been convinced that this was caused by un

This is my first Yeast only miltigrain wholewheat from Hamelman's BREAD under Preferments:

I accidentally used 1T extra of sea salt. To my surprise the bread even tasted better!

Happy Holidays to everyone!

During our last trip to Portland I lured my (for good reasons) wary husband to go with me to "Rabelais", with the sanctimonious promise "just wanting to look what's new". Rabelais is cooks' equivalent to an opium den, a famous cookbooks-only store; they carry probably every English language (and several foreign language) cookbook on the market, plus many antique ones.

My second batch of pandoros came out very nice as well! I used Glezer's recipe. It was amazing how difficult it was to find cocoa-butter in this town. Especially when you know that Amsterdam is the #1 harbour for shipping the stuff around the world... In certain weather conditions we can smell the coacoa from our balcony, but for buying the cocoa-butter I ended up going out of town to a very old fashioned drugstore in a nearby city. The oddities of globalization, I guess... Anyway. here it is: my second batch of pandoros!

On X-mas we'll be having a cheese-thingie going on with friends, so I made my first 4 pounder today. It looks quite spectacular I think:

This dough is quite soft, and I forgot to fold it 3x early on in the ferment, so i did one fold and at the end of the 3 hour ferment and hoped for the best. It came out flatter than I wanted, but it did get a substantial oven spring, so I'm  happy.

Well, time passed in that way it does and soon I had two loaves ready for the oven: 

I trimmed the parchment paper (which burned to a crisp, by the way, any tips on avoiding that in the future?), wished them well, and gently slid them on the stone. 

Twenty minutes later, I pulled out these: 

Not in the mood to spend hours in the kitchen, or feeling confident yet enough to tackle an authentic italian panettone, but want a lovely festive tasty panettone!  Mix it up tonight, bake it tomorrow!  These are festive little Panettone's and perfect for the Christmas Caroler's along with cup of hot coco! 

this loaf came together GREAT, following my old standard 1,2,3 sourdough bread recipe here but using 1/3 whole wheat flour.  

9 oz starter (rejuvenated after a several week hiatus)

18 oz water

18 oz bread flour + 9 oz whole wheat flour

1 Tbsp salt

I mixed and kneaded for about 2 minutes, then did 2 stretch and folds. The dough behaved very well;  not too wet, and it held its shape.

1:52 p.m.:

Well, the dough has risen once and, as instructed, I have shaped it into two "irregular ovals," or at least what I hope are irregular ovals. Now they are sitting atop parchment paper, hopefully doubling in size again, waiting to be transferred to my pizza stone on the bottom of rack of the oven, which I will turn on to pre-heat in about 10 minutes. Here they were, just before I covered them: