Blog posts

I have picking teketeke's (Akikio) brain on making a yeast water starter and baking bread with it.  Akiko is a a generous person and very knowlegable about YW.  Since I have minneolas in the back yard, I started my yeast water with them and apples.  I was successful first time thanks to Akiko.  I built up a levain over 3 days and started searching for a recipe to use it on.  Zolablue's explosive spring Semolina Bread jumped out because the crumb I thought would work very well with the color of the TW.  Here is my formula,  Sorry it is not as

This is in reference to Chef Reinhart's Ciabatta with Biga.  I think what helped me was to re-read the directions time and time again. And to watch different videos. I feel it was successful...thank you Chef.

Croissant Dough with a Sponge

My base recipe for laminated yeasted dough, with a couple of amendments.   A bit of sugar is included, although my own preference remains a croissant without sugar.   And I have adapted the formula to use a sponge where 20% of the total flour becomes pre-fermented.

I have about 100 recipes and counting I want to try from old cookbooks as well as new cookbooks, not to mention all the recipes I have saved from various blog posts and websites.  Having said that I decided to experiment on my own instead and came up with a variation of Peter Reinhart's San Francisco sourdough using durum flo

I baked this bread yesterday evening.  Sliced it this morning and left for the day and most of the evening.  My grandaughters 20th birthday is Sunday and I had some shopping to do with my daughter after seeing my oldest grandson off to his rowing club race..it was a lovely day and I didn't cook...for a change.   When I returned.  Mike had eaten almost half the loaf.  He was probably starving, because he doesn't cook or maybe he really liked this bread...I'll find out tomorrow.  I tasted it and thought it was delicious.

Make your own Greek yogurt and then use the drippings to make great bread by substituting the yogurt whey water for the water in your bread.

Get stuck with too many Red Pears and and Blueberries?  Make a chocolate crust, lemon and blueberry cheesecake and a blueberry, ginger and red pear Italian fruit tart with home made Puff Pastry that's what !!!!!

After finding out the Pierre Nury's Rustic Light Rye didn't have much if any rye taste or earthy taste either, I decided to try and see if I could get more rye taste and earth flavor without totally compromising Pierre's fine SD bread completely.

My next attempt at learning something new about bread, I decided to bake off David Snyder's SFSD that he is trying to perfect like the rest of his fine breads, with Pierre Nury's light SD Rye that I ran across in zolablu's fine blog.  Thought I would make them both as directed and bake them off in the same oven at the same time now that is is clean after my San Joaquin adventure even if it was a fiasco.  I used a compromised temp, steam and time since they didn't quite line up perfectly.  I did shape the Nury loaf and lightlu slashed it before in went into

Pizza is one the special favorites we make when my daughter brings her sorority sisters home from college for pizza night.  What they don't expect is a very thin crust that is sourdough, has whole wheat and garbanzo flour, sun dried tomatoes, fresh rosemary and garlic in it.  They also can't believe that they can make their own from a wide range of toppings, most of which are home made including spicy sauce -  and they can load it up with worrying that the crust will not be able to handle it.