Blog posts

 Easter as we know is shared and respected over most of the world. Last year I noticed  people were asking for recipies for Easter breads.

So I noted that for next year(being 2011) I would start a blog asking people of different nationalities to share their traditional easter bread from their homeland or even a recipe handed down through their families over the years that comes out as family treat at easter only.

Recently my husband announced that he needed to cut way back on salt in his diet, and after quizzing me about the bread I've been baking, determined that he needed to cut way back on my bread.   Given that he's my principal guinea pig (I mean recipient, I mean,... oh forget it)  I viewed this as a setback.   After some thought though I realized it was an opportunity.   And so ...  Tuscan bread.

This is my second experiment with using beer brewing methods to make a bread.

This time I wanted to see how the flovor of hops would taste in a baked loaf. 

barley flour soaker. Leave at room temp overnight.

Peter Reinhart calls for malt powder in several recipes in Crust and Crumb so I ordered some diastatic malt from Amazon.  Yesterday was the first time I've tried it.  The stuff tastes quite sweet.  I threw together some dough, doubling up on the yeast and malt percentages Reinhart might call for just for jollies.  The stuff rose higher and faster than anything I can recall!!!  It was surprising, almost spooky!

My wife and I are beginning to learn the techniques involved in baking bread. So many new terms to learn, so many steps to master. We appreciate this forum as the readers here have already helped us tremendously.

Our question now is the difference between starter and preferment. We were advised to use a preferment to create more flavor and possibly larger holes in our foccacia loaves. While reading about preferments we came across the term "starter" which we had heard before. We thought starter was only used in sourdough bread.

I tried making my first loaf of bread that wasn't entirely made from white flour. 

As much as I love white bread, I'm eating it all the time so I felt the need for something that was a bit better for me.

I just used what I already know for making white bread and added some rye flour and wholemeal flours, then mixed in some mixed seeds. 

I'd say the percentages of flour were roughly;

60% Strong White

30% Rye

10% Wholemeal

1 egg

Another weekend baking with 20% rye bread. This time I made the bread using white starter. I still continued retarding the shaped loaved overnight. I was aiming to reduce the sour flavour in the bread I made last weekend (same 20% rye and retardation, but with rye sourdough starter).