Blog posts

There are 2 reasons why I am celebrating!

First is, it's my dad's 72nd birthday and second is...

The one who is typing this post that you are currently reading is NOW a PROFESSIONAL LICENSED TEACHER!!!

Hello to all you wise sages out there.  Long post, but I'm really hoping you amazing bakers out there can ease my recent torment!

Hi bakers!

I'm experimenting with sweet sourdoughs and I arrived at this formula after testing another one with less sugar. 

This loaf has 100gr of fine unrefined cane sugar and 150gr of toasted walnuts and I think that the sweetness now is on point.

I used half wholegrain flour and half white bread flour, the fermentation was a little bit slower than my normal schedule due to the presence of the sugar (I asked Maurizio Leo and he said so, I thought it was the opposite! Silly me). 

Hi bakers!

Today I come here half happy and half unhappy. I'm happy because I baked my first loaf of sourdough using 50% of khorasan whole wheat flour (and I think that this flour is aromatic in such a particular way that reminds me of chamomile) but I'm not so happy because maybe I let the fermentation process gone too far and the bread came out a little bit flat :(. 

After one loaf of 50% sprouted and whole grain bread she went back to a white bread this week.  Yeah, she picked one that we don’t do very often at 83% hydration, it had some whole grain in it that was semi-related to durum semolina, we needed something to put pork inside with cheese and then into the panini press and at least it was SD.

Apparently, these are inspired by Ian aka the King of Buns as referred to by dabrownman. As I can never allow myself to follow a recipe exactly, of course I have changed things up to show my own character. Unlike Ian, who blended the cream cheese with the dough, I put in chunks of cream cheese. Also, candied orange peels and sunflower seeds are incorporated to make the rolls more interesting. Rye flours are usually used along with orange and earl grey, yet to break the tradition, I chose to use barley flour (which resembles more of Ian’s rolls as well).

Looks like this fellow Karl de Smedt had the same idea as Alt Altus.

I like his name for it better: Fleur de Levain.

Happy Baking,

Tom

Hi There,

I have heard some people bake to discharge the tension and the stress after a week of hard working but this definitely did not happen to me :).

In fact I started baking with the idea of saving some money and after lots of failures, I started becoming even more stressed. As any newbie, I had been looking for the best sourdough recipe and none of the ones I tried worked for me. Surely, I told myself, people do not reveal the secrets behind a wonderful loaf nor the most popular books do. 

This recipe was given to me by my late sister in law.   

Greeting - been a little while since I posted thanks to being busier than normal but thought I'd drop a snap of a mixed bake - bread and croissants. This sure does challenge your timing skills and this time ended up with really nice crumb on the baguettes but a little overproofed croissants - no big deal - still pretty edible.