Blog posts

I was exhilarated.  Finally, I made my first baguettes.  It's Reinhart's poolish/pate fermentee baguette with a 55.9% hydration.  The crust was crispy, even though I'd prefer a more golden brown color, and the crumbs were very springy and soft.  By tasting these baguettes, we could feel the recipe originator's passion for good flavors.  

Being a certified organic farmer means MUCH more than just not using chemicals. It means a different way of farming altogether than conventional farming. Certified organic farming means you have to leave buffer strips to make sure that adjoining fields can't contaminate your fields with chemical sprays and GMO crops. This is done by tilling under a large section of your fields that are near neighboring fields. We can't use chemicals in organic farming so we have to remove weeds with the tractor and methods called multiweeding and harrowing.

This is one of the recipes that I sought to make because of available ingredients. My in-laws just made another batch of maple syrup for this year (they do around March) and gave us some. I still had some from last year's, so I thought I'd look for a recipe to use up the opened jar sitting int he fridge. I found one at KAF, but I modified the recipe. Reading their blog about the recipe, I learned that they originally made use of 1/2 cup maple syrup.

Full post here.

Ever seen something like this in a Hong Kong style bakery?

For the last few weeks, I have moved away from sourdough levain to straightforward yeast recipes. However, this weekend, I decided to revive my starter and try out something new: Eric's Favorite Rye (ici: http://tinyurl.com/d4v344).

I had to restart my sourdough starter due to neglecting it recently and, this time, I've made some interesting observations.

Why Boosted Brown Rice Starter?

(You can, if you wish, skip all my mutterings. The recipe is at the bottom.)

My little Welsh grandmother was a gentle soul with streaks of stubbornness, impishness, and independence just below the surface. Born in Wales in the 1883 she sailed to America, with her coalminer father and her mother in 1894. By the time I knew her only her baking, and a light lilt in her speech hinted her origins; she had become American, through and through.

My oldest son bought a bread machine in 1988. A, Rube Goldbergesque device that, after a fashion, produced an oddly shaped loaf of bread reminiscent of a miner’s lunch pail: tall where it should be short, square where it should be round, and round where it should be square.  Its white bread cycle produced a soft-crusted loaf, with a crumb akin to Wonder Bread. I don’t recall if it had any other cycle choices. I promptly lost interest in bread machines, and for the next decade remained a smug, hands-on baker.

...but bread is alright.

I wanted to experiment a little this week, so I decided to bake two new loaves. I think both turned out rather well, and I'll probably add them to the list of loaves I'm baking quite frequently. The first one is a loaf that goes remarkably well with most kinds of fruit, preserves, a wide range of cheeses and besides your dinner plate: A sourdough rye with toasted hazelnuts and raisins.