Blog posts

I said I was going to take a break and bake other things, and I am determined to follow through.  We made our annual pilgrimage to Apple Hill in the Placerville area of California, USA this past Saturday.  We go every year to buy fresh apples, eat too much apple pie, and enjoy the Fall season, mountain air, and fresh apples.  With a half bushel of Stayman Winesap apples we brought home sitting in a corner in the kitchen, I had to bake Aunt Lillian's Apple Cake from Inside the Jewish Bakery.  We are very glad I did, because this is really, really good!

My husband requested some seeded sourdough loaves to go with our soup this week.  I was happy to find the 'Seedy Whole Wheaty Sourdough' recipe on this site and set out to fulfill the order. 

I have said before that gluttony is among my favorites of the deadly sins; the craving for fat, salt and sugar is a delightful vice.  Favoring gluttony, though, runs contrary to my part time dedication to rationality; good sense indicates that gluttony can be detrimental.  This dissonance—which regularly afflicts bakers—is my topic today.

OldWoodenSpoon has been chronicling his adventures and misadventures of baking the Vienna bread from the Inside the Jewish Bakery book.  Partly out of sympathy and partly out of curiosity, I decided to bake the same bread this weekend to see what would happen.

In a word (or three), not very much.

Things to note:

- I'm using a no-name AP flour

- The yeast was Fleischmann's IDY from a new package.

- Since I had no malt on hand, honey was subbed for the malt in equal amount.

Saturday

What better reason to bake than catching up with family and friends for lunch. On a hot humid Saturday we drove down to Nat’s parents for a lunch with old family friends from her childhood. In our possession was our contribution to lunch … bread. A bread based on Gérard Rubaud’s formula for Pain au Levain.

Hello,
This bread I tasted for the first time last August (swoon).
After baking this bread in September, I kept remembering the wonderful aroma and flavor.
Time flies, and already it's the middle of November; time to make some more of this delicious rye.



The crumb, after 24 hours:

Bread videó

Please see the original post at Ovenmittsblog.wordpress.com for the recipe!

  This is a bread using my most basic dough which I’d been using for a long time since I first started tempting to make sourdough-based Pain de Campagne-type bread.  It’s simple, versatile and taste quite good without too assertive or too distinctive. It is good enough to bake as plain, basic sourdough bread but also good with various fillings, like dried fruits, nuts and seeds, etc…..or it was. Actually, I hadn’t used this dough for a long while.