Managing the Water
Greetings from Finland!
After years of reading your posts (and drooling over your tasty and beautiful loaves) for inspiration, I thought I'd start my own blog here too. During the days I'm a stay-at-home dad exploring life with my two boys (ages 4.6 and 2 :)). The rest of my time, mostly when my family is asleep, I try to split between baking, writing and some other creative experiments. And browsing The Fresh Loaf.
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Over the weekend, I finally worked up the courage to try making Bruno's Pandoro from Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking. I followed the the formula almost exactly. The one thing I changed was to replace all of the whole eggs in the formula with an equal amount of egg yolks by weight. I had the idea in my mind that this would give the final product better color and flavor (more on this later).
I’ve had a few months break from baking – having a little one takes a lot of your time!! No matter how many people tell you, you won’t know till it actually happens to you.
Anywho, the little monkey is asleep and I can update my blog with the recent bakes, got a bit of a backlog to get through.
Today’s post is about lemon cupcakes – I know its not bread, but its baking, so I figured that its worth blogging about - link here.
I mostly prefer straight breads, but had some ricotta that was left over and in danger of souring, so decided on a whim to add it to a bread dough I've been baking a lot lately, along with some fried onion. The result knocked my socks off!
Pane de Campagne with Red Fife 75% sifted and Rye Bread with Barley
German Style-Many Seed Bread
When Hanseata posted her last bread of the year, it was a reminder of a recipe I have seen in Peter Rhinehart’s “Whole Grain Breads”. I hadn't made this one yet but it looks like it has promise. Actually, I love this book. Peters “Epoxy or pre dough” method is inspired. The need for less kneading during the final dough mix delivers delicious results every time. I get rave reviews on all the breads I bake from WGB.
This is completely off-topic.
Discounting the ocassional hurricane, and the ever increasing summer heat, Florida is a good state to live in, especially if you grow a winter garden. We generally plant cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli in late October to early November. The broccoli is always the first to mature.
I've been wrestling with producing a 50% Whole Wheat sourdough loaf that has good flavor and an open, chewy crumb. I've described my difficulties, and, finally a successful attempt in: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/25804/whole-wheat-sunday
I won't repeat the details here, but I'll summarize what I've learned. I believe the comments are relevant to all lean dough sourdough breads to some extent, but the degree of importance may vary depending on the flours used.
