Blog posts

I'm still having some home-grown apples that I wanted to use and I was thinking about apple bread. Originally, I thought about making apple and oats bread from Bourke Street Bakery cook book. However, I bought quite a few new bread-making books that I should use. So turning to Dan Lepard's books, I saw a promising apple bread recipe.

These are a couple of 755 gm bâtards of Hamelman's Pain au Levain I baked today. I think they illustrate the points made recently in discussions of scoring, ears and bloom, for example in Varda's topic To ear or not to ear.

To quote Michel Suas from Advanced Bread and Pastry again,

I was eating a bowl of Cream of Wheat for the first time in ten years. That is the only inspiration for this loaf. I think a souerdough starter would work well with this recipe. 

My partner's father and sister are here to visit. They each occupy one of the downstairs rooms that I meticulously cleaned before they arrived, so much so that I drove myself into hand-wringing worry over each minute detail in their rooms. Then the cobwebs in the other corners of the house laugh at me.

Easter is almost here and it means the long weekend is not far away. Easter is the longest holiday in Australia and it is even longer this year. The Easter Monday falls on our national public holiday, Anzac Day. So, we end up with 5-day long weekend. I'm so looking forwards to the short break and mini getaway.

I have been making bread from Tartine Bread, basically a naturally leavened bread.  The flavors have been outstanding, as well as the crumb.  I have experiemented with various hydration percentages (75% and 80%).  The 75% seemed to spring a bit better than the 80%.  The 80% was raised at a bit higher ambient temperature and probably for a bit too long; the dough seemed too puffy and sloppy.

Ron's post about these crackers is as thorough as they come, so please get the recipe there if you are interested. I added 20% of cheddar cheese to the dough, turned out perfect, so much better than store bought. And easy to make too!

Hi everybody,

Sorry haven't been around posting much.  I have been baking, but on a much smaller and less often scale these days, and blogging much less...  I'm pretty much swamped at work these days...  Yesterday evening though, I did find some time to bake a little something...

Enjoy!

Tim

This post is about sourdough made of whole-milled grains which are grown locally. 

Today I baked 4 loaves, 2 light rye and 2 pain rustique from JH 'Bread'.  After seeing Franko's lovely bake of the Pain Rustique, it sounded and looked so good, what a perfect bread to have on hand. The flavor is delicious and the crust sang.  I left the caraway out of the light rye.  The bread is very good, but I prefer more of a rye flavor. We were up late last night and so it was about 2am I put together my poolish and sourdough..tired as I was today, I baked the breads and made a rotisserie chicken for dinner.