Blog posts

Although my baking has waned recently because I need to reduce the bread backlog in my freezer, it hasn't gone entirely dormant.  For instance, I baked some hamburger buns today (thanks, dolfs!) as a demonstration/interview for an instructor's position with the Culinary Center of Kansas City.  It was a lot of fun and felt more than a little bizarre.

Chocolate flavored coffee.....what could be wrong with using some in a bread you ask?  Nothing of course, so why not use it in a soaker as well ?  That is exactly what I ended up doing.  I normally leave the grains soaking for about 30 minutes to an hour, but in this case I left it over night for around 24 hours and the soaker grains sucked up all the coffee.  When I mixed the final do

Summer News.   My path in becoming a baker... (part II)

... goes through Kalispell Montana USA

 (A true story about chance, adventure and passion without boundaries)

Hello, TFL friends.

In my last post, I experimented with spelt flour in a country bread. The flavor was very appealing with slight nutty undertones and the bread came out great! However, I'm never satisfied with my last bread and always want to push into new areas. So I decided to increase the spelt in the formula from 10% to 20%.

There are not too many things I like more than a pastrami sandwich, so when my wife suggested I try using some left over pastrami on a pizza I figured it was worth a shot.  I also had some left over smoked pulled pork in the refrigerator so I figured I would make a barbecued pulled pork pizza as well

I found this when going through some old files on my computer: (pdf file) Marcel Desaulnier's Old-Fashioned Speckled Chocolate Cake.pdf

Oh, boy i feel at home, again!

Not only baking is addictive, it has become a part of me now. Almost 3 months of bed rest, and ayurvedic therapy, 1 of which was spent in Kerala, the beautiful southern city of India; has never detached me from thefreshloaf site, nor did my enthusiasm for bread baking waver.

If you haven't tried David Snyder's SF Sourdough bread technique yet, you really should.  It is a crusty, tasty bread that is very forgiving to make.  I have made it a number of times, and have been making some small adjustments to fit my schedule and my tastes.  In the last two weeks, I baked it twice and thought I would share some photos.

I was commenting on txfarmer's very nice 30% rye sandwich bread that we use left over cream to make ice cream in AZ when it is scorching hot in the summer - instead of pechy scones like she does.  The batch finished yesterday, after a 2 day process, came out better than usual because we managed to have most everything on hand to put it over the top.

The first day is used to make the ice cream base: