Blog posts

Tried a new method on a standard bake for me with the best results so far (on the outside anyway).  Beginner's Luck?  Will have to see if I can repeat it.

When it comes to folds and shaping, I kind of feel like I'm all thumbs.  When to fold?  Which fold to do?  How hard to stretch? How hard to degas? Which pre-shape? Etc.  Skills I need to develop, but I'm not very consistent yet.

This is a variation on Chad Robertson's Oat Porridge Bread in his book Tartine 3. It is essentially the same bread but with slightly less oat porridge and the addition of some cooked whole oat berries. It is one of my favourite breads.

Ingredients

Usually my sourdough discard ends up in Dutch baby pancakes or flat breads but this week I used the discard (just over 200g) in a Garlic Herb & Cheese Pull-apart loaf and remade my orange cake with dark chocolate.

Wanted to bake some proper rye bread this week, so decided to repeat the "Nobleman's" rye following Rus Brot's recipe https://youtu.be/1Vwf3TzPTYU (sorry, video in Russian)

Here is my formula using a mix of whole and light rye flour instead of medium, due to availability: https://fgbc.dk/1i8m

The Fresh Loaf is on a new server now. Hopefully you'll all find your way here and the new server performs just as well as the old one.

Nothing significant changed from a user's perspective. The server is running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS instead of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The versions of PHP, MariaDB, and some of the other tools have been upgraded accordingly.

This paves the way for a site software upgrade in the hopefully not-too-distant future, but that is a bigger undertaking.

Please let me know if you notice any problems that might be related to the move.

This loaf is a complete game changer for me. This is my first (nearly) 100% whole wheat loaf (I think!) that I have found to be delicious. I'm generally an aspirational high-percentage whole wheater - I'll often make high percent whole wheat loaves wanting to enjoy them, but ultimately finding them overpowering in flavor and sourness.

Heads up that an upgrade to the server TFL runs on is coming up soon. It's actually a migration to a new machine, not an in place upgrade. That's a safer approach because if anything goes wrong I can bail out and leave the site and server as they are right now.

I'm hoping to take care of it tomorrow late afternoon Pacific time but it might not happen until later in the week. I'll post another announcement an hour or so before I start.

Inspired by Benny's red fife bakes, and an earlier red fife by @suminandi that caught my eye, I wanted to see what I could learn from working with this flavorful but fermentation intolerant heritage grain.  I'll be doing a few bakes with this one using desem at different percentages of PFF.

Had a quick bake today testing a recipe for a friend that was in her breadmaker  booklet,  it came out rather nice but i did tell her hers wont come out looking the same.

The Garlic and Herb dough placed into the cold Sassafras and washed with cornflour paste

The poppy and sesame seed applied

I stopped by the Grow NY grain stand at the local farmers market and picked up the lone bag of Frederick soft white wheat berries they had and a few bags of stone-ground flour from Farmer Ground and Small Valley Farm so I could sample some local wheat varieties and try a few bakes with professionally milled whole grain flour for comparison with Mockmilled flour.  Larger bags of wheat berries can be ordered for pick up in advance.  I am interested in the Renan flour, but a 50 lb minimum is a bit intimidating.  If someone in the NYC area is interested in splitting an order plea