I still find it a funny experience to bake and then display small snippets of my life. Over the past fortnight I have perhaps pondered too deeply on this and my relationship with baking and bread … driven poor Nat to distraction I am sure.
So what do I want my bread to be like?
I made the Ciabatta from Professor Reinhart’s formula in Bread Baker’s Apprentice today. Easy to make, though I can see where a novice might want to add more flour to the gloppy dough instead of trusting to the magic of gluten. I added a heaping teaspoon of milk powder to soften the crumb. I shaped a pound of dough into four large rolls.
It’s a simple bread. Nice texture and good flavor, but nothing to write home about. I think it would be good for a sandwich roll.
First, a tip of the hat to theuneditedfoodie for his recommendation of Chris Glen's breads. Thank you, Raj!
hi there everyone just starting off here with the bloggy action. this is 30% whole wheat sourdough that i have been making every week for sandwiches and just to have around the house. i will be detailing more work in the future, but part of this is figuring out the technology (of blogging about bread) which i am currently doing.
La Micca a Lievitazione Naturale sulla tavola per cena. Solo lievito naturale in coltura liquida, farina tipo 2 (forte), acqua (78%), sale integrale.
[color=blue]The Sourdough Miche on my dinner table. Only liquid sourdough culture, high extraction wheat flour (strong), water (78%), unrefined sea salt.[/color]
Over the past three or four weeks I've been experimenting with small adjustments, one at a time, to my process. Three of them appear to be adding positive nuances to my loaves. They are:
• longer autolyse, prior to adding yeast (or levain) and salt.
• using new steam-generating containers.
• warming retarded, pre-shaped dough, and final proofing at elevated temperature: 82°F
I'm not dead, I've just been hiding from the temptations of the current ITJB items...
Plus, I haven't done anything interesting other than my usual weekly sourdoughs that we live off of, with maybe the following exceptions:
I made a bunch of marbled, braided loaves for people that I didn't get pictures of. At the end, I had a handful of strands left over and I was tired of braiding, so I shoved them into a lidless pullman pan...
My first post! I keep my bread notes in a cheap notebook stuck to my fridge, but thought a bread blog might work better, and enable me to share my notes. I am fairly new to bread baking and find some of the posts here rather intimidating. I took an artisan bread baking course at our local technical college last fall, developed a wild yeast starter during the class, and was off and running with the longer-fermentation methods. Before the class I had been making all our bread, but just plain whole wheat sandwich loaves from my own flour, mixed and kneaded and bak
