Blog posts

So, life has taken me on a charming and busy ride-no blogging time and I am therefore way behind on posting about my recent bakes. Not that there is anything to be missed since some of them did no turn out(and it seems I might not even have taken a picture of one of the breads,oh well).

Bread#1:

Irish Soda Bread

As my baking evolves I am drawn more towards hearty rye sourdough breads in the northern European style.  I also like big and bold flavors that complement the rye and sour nuances of the bread. 

Thus my spur of the moment decision to also add the following to my 2.5lb loaf:

1 tbs fresh ground black pepper

2 tbs red pepper flakes (pizzeria type)

1 tbs fresh diced rosemary

End of the week,  my family who has been away from me for a week are coming back.  That's also an excuse for me to bake for them again.  I wanted to do something that they like,  and for a change,  a sweet dough recipe is good.  Inspiration from Home Happy Baking - a fantastic baker,  with beautiful pics and blogs,  I made these heart shaped tuna buns and blue berry buns.

Today I baked 10 loaves in my simple gas oven, 4 at a time, and I am not displeased with the results.  They are for donation at our church tomorrow; we provide food for those in need once a month.  My motives in baking were also selfish in that the more I bake, the better baker i  become.  6 loaves are from the formula for "White Bread Plus" in Joy of Cooking, and 4 are Sourdough Bread from Sourdough Cookery by Rita Davenport.

With our second child, my wife was desperate to have the baby by the due date. Her parents were leaving for England for three weeks and they really wanted to meet the baby before they left!

 When people think of sourdough starter lineages they often think of the famous San Francisco or Alaska starters originally brought over from Europe. I imagine the people who brought starters along with them were courageous people looking for a better life. I imagine they dehydrated their starters in the old country and carried small amounts of it in pouches or tiny clay pots carefully tucked into whatever belongings they could carry with them in the boats. When they got to the land of opportunity it is said their bread starters took on a new flavor, the flavor of their new locale.

I again followed the 1-2-3 sourdough recipe but this time, I used 9 oz starter, 18 oz water, and 9 oz whole wheat flour, 9 oz bread flour and 9 oz all purpose flour (I ran out of bread flour).  I mixed until moist and let rest 1-2 hours.  did 3 stretch and folds over several hours and then put it in the fridge for an overnight retard (that ended up being almost 24 hours;  I punched it down after 12).  I shaped it, let it rise covered on the counter for 2 and a half hours or so.  Baked on a stone with steam, 500 °F for 2 minutes and then 450 for 38 more.

Both are from the book "Advanced Bread and Pastry". I have been baking from it a lot lately as you can tell from my blog entries, my feeling about the book is mostly positive, with some caveats. It''s a textbook for SFBI students, and stays true to that premise. I like the fact that it not only has interesting recipes, but also solid theories.

The first night in CUE and a good sleep ensued, i was awoken by the unmistakeable sound of rain falling on the caravan roof lightly at first but then a little heavier, bad news for prospecting in the flat red dirt but ordinarily a most welcomed sound out here. The clouds had been chasing us all the way from Perth some 640 kilometres behind us.

I have been been experimenting with rye during my past few bakes and this week I made Hamleman's rye bread with flasxseeds (wich I first saw in hansjoakim's post here). The recipe is from the site Modern Baking and you can find a reduced recipe in David's post about it. I have also made the bread as a 1 kg boule, like david did.