Blog posts

Victory is mine!  If you haven't been following my occasional series of posts, six months ago I set out to improve my baguette skills by making a batch Hamelman's "Baguettes with Poolish" every Saturday and blogging about it here.  I haven't been entirely rigorous about the blogging, but I've kept up the baking, skipping only one weekend in all that time.  Here's what I said I wanted to achieve in week 1:

In March I travelled.  A lot.  My best guess is about 10,000 miles.  And, of course, when I travel I search for good bread.

I found a great pretzel recipe here by Floydm The crumb was crunchy and the real bread was chewy. Again, This is a great pretzel recipe and I recommend every one to try it. Thank you Floydm.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pretzels

I also converted the measurements to grams. Find the conversions below.

      1 tsp Active dry yeast ( 3g)  The yeast ran out, it was actually less 1 tsp.

I love making tarts! It's my new obsession! I've tried a couple recipes, but this French Date and Almond Tart is my absolute favorite... Well after some recipe testing and revisions. In fact, I love it so much that I'm officially naming it my signature pastry.

This recipe is from "Advanced Bread and Pastry". Using white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and cracked wheat (aka. bulgur, my new favorite bread ingredient), the bread is super fragrant and packful of flavors. I wanted to convert the formula to use sourdough, but was busy preparing for and running a half marathon last weekend, so stuck to the poolish version in the book.

From the last bake, all dressed up and ready to be consumed:

This wasn't my first Pain Au levain, but surely the best of the bunch. I have baked Vermont Sourdough with increased wholewheat, and Pain Au levain with Mixed Sourdough starters...Those were not successful as i was struggling with ways to please my starter.. But i loved this one! No wonder why so many TFL members bake it frequently.