Blog posts

I recently started eating real sourdough bread again.   I had avoided all bread for years until I understood that the lectins in seeded and whole grain breads were the problem, not the plain flour.  Anyway, I am looking for a great sourdough recipe that only uses unbleached white flour.  I have a great sourdough on my counter and have attempted a few loaves this past week.  Thanks much

After reading Trevor Wilson's Crumb Mastery, I think I have to rethink a lot of my processes.  His explanations are so good and a lot of it makes a great deal of sense.  I don't understand quite all of it but hopefully this will come as I keep working on improving my bread.  

Now Lucy has her teeth cleaned too!  She isn’t happy about it like we are and bit every vet she could clamp onto before and after the procedure.  Her breath is 1,000% nicer for sure.  So now she will get her teeth cleaned every year since we now have an insurance policy on her through Pets Mart.  She doesnlt know about that yet….

In high school, Louis Diat was my hero, and I baked croissants, brioches, and challah, so there was fresh bread and pastry in our house almost every day. (Most of the year, there was also a surplus of eggs and garden produce.)  By the late 1970s, I was pastry chef in pretentious restaurants in New York City. After that, I ran and owned restaurants and hotels in California for a few years, before changing my life. In all, I have baked a lot of stuff that looked and tasted just like what you would find in a good bakery.

Whenever I'm visiting my hometown Hamburg, I check out new bakeries. Two years ago I noticed people lining up in front of Bäcker Gaues, in lively Eppendorf quarter (where my Mom lives around the corner.)

Taking this as a good omen, I joined the waiting line. The shelves full of loaves and rolls looked promising, all with fairly dark crusts - boldly baked, as Ken Forkish ("Flour, Water, Salt and Yeast") would call it. A paradise for crust lovers!

I used the technique in Tartine.. The more stretch and folds I do the more awesome the bread comes out.

nice crust..crumb was slightly chewy with a wonderful tang and flavor 

We had a pot luck to go to and I wanted to try something different, so I looked up rolls in the index of The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg.  There were about 6 different rolls in the book and I finally selected Rye Sticks as the rolls that I would make and take with us.  I was one of Stan’s recipe testers for this book as well as many other members of The Fresh Loaf.  The Rye Sticks was not one of the recipes that the group that I was in got to test but I remember seeing posts from those that did. 

I was super happy with the way these Bialys turned out. It’s pretty similar pizza dough I make. Then you press  down in the middle to make a space for the onion and poppy seed. I baked about 25 minutes at 425. 

I dug the sweet potatoes a few weeks ago and they are cured enough to start eating. The apples have been harvested and the wild hazelnuts along the back fence are ready to pick... it's time to make some bread to celebrate the fall season.

This is based on a basic sourdough formula, adopted fairly successfully to accommodate the sweet potatoes and seeds.

350 gr         100% levain

1000 gr        KA Artisan Select

And showing off a bit :-)

Following on from earlier posts about confusion with under/over proofing I decided this weekend just to push it as far as I dared on the bulk stage and see what happened. I'm very pleased with the results