Blog posts

This lunch was made with the 20% whole grain baggies.  After a busy weekend doing nothing much, it was nice to have some ready made sammy materials to use for lunch.  This YW bread was made for flavor as opposed for holes.  It came out of the freezer in good shape.

Had some left over grilled Japanese eggplant to go with leftover Holiday Ham, last nights salad, half a tomato, last of the brie cheese, home made Dijon mustard and some mayo.

With a lot of baguette dough and a home oven.

Lately I have been working with ever larger batches of dough.  This is good training as it helps develop one’s eye in terms of dividing, does a little hand skill training on wrangling a larger volume, and because I have a tiny kitchen, ups the bar on mise en place and other organizational skills.

Yeah. French makes everything seem fancier. Anyway, today I made three kinds of bread from the San Francisco-style Sourdough dough I've been playing with for the past couple months.

The dough was basically version 6. I put my stock starter through 3 builds of 75% AP and 25% WW at 50% hydration. The builds were fed at approximately 12 hour intervals, and the third build was cold retarded for about 14 hours then fermented at 85 dF for 3 hours before mixing the dough to make 2 kg. After dividing and shaping, all products were cold retarded again before final proofing and baking.

Every once in a while, things don't go exactly as planned, but the result is really good anyway.  This is one of those times - a happy accident.

A bakery re-born

Hi and welcome to my first blog and my first tentative steps into the bakery business.

Hi everyone,

It's been a long time since I've been able to contribute anything to the community here at TFL. Clinic and hospital visits (as a patient) most weekends, some overtime work at my main job and a lot of editing work up until the end of the fiscal year here in Japan have kept me too busy to post anything.

My training in making sourdough bread continues with growing success. See previous report here. I have followed advice I received on TFL to stick with a recipe that works for me to gain experience and skill. Doing the same recipe over and over again helps me to compare the outcome and learn from it. The recipe is from Home Cooking Adventure: Easy Sourdough Bread - Vermont Bread.

One of my favorite books is Niki Segnet's The Flavour Thesaurus. You choose a flavour and The Flavour Thesaurus recommends other compatible ones.

I found this match for prunes and decided to make a bread that captures all of these flavours in a single loaf.

In October, 2008 I posted a formula for Greenstein's Jewish Sour Rye which converted his recipe, which was written in volume measurements, to ingredient weights. I have made this bread many times since, but I've never bothered to calculate the baker's percentages for the formula. I decided to do so today and thought I would post the procedures as a tutorial on “baker's math” for new baker's and others who have just never gotten comfortable with this very valuable tool.

Here is the formula I wrote in 2008.