Blog posts

Bad Boy With Poolish

Profile picture for user JMonkey
I realize that I seriously risk tanking my whole grain cred, here, but lately ... I've been taking a shine to poolish. It'd been a long time since I'd worked with yeasted pre-ferments, and aside from an occasional baguette here and there, I'd not make a serious white bread in quite some time.

But after the New Year, in the course of just a couple of days, I made three poolish baguettes and one poolish ciabatta.

A Fresh Loaf Inspired Pet Project

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I remember a few years ago when I discovered the Fresh Loaf. I was overwhelmed with the wealth of information and friendly comments and created an account immediately. For the most part I've been silently watching from the sidelines, jealous of anyone making the time to try new things and post their foods. Oh how it looked like so much fun!

Server reboot and patches applied

Profile picture for user Floydm
I applied a bunch of system patches, did a server reboot, and upgraded to the latest version of Drupal today. The server took about 5 minutes to come back, which is longer than usual, and just long enough to make me worry that I was going to have to spend the rest of my day emailing back and forth with tech support. Happily, it looks like everything came back fine. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Italian Bread

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I've been lurking on this site for awhile and decided to register so I can start keeping a log of what I make.  My husband loves when I make the Italian bread listed under the Favorite Recipes, so here's how my first batch came out.  I melted a little butter on the top after removing it from the oven.

Italian Bread 

Sullivan Street potato pizza

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I've been doing quite a bit of baking this weekend. In addition to the Grape Harvest Focaccia I've blogged about yesterday, today I made the potato pizza from Maggie Glezer's "Artisan Baking". The recipe calls for a very wet dough -- more water than flour, actually. You knead the dough using the paddle on your stand mixer for 20 whole minutes. In the process it miraculously transforms from this:

Kneading the dough

To this:

Grape Harvest Focaccia

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Today I decided to bake the Grape Harvest Focaccia from Daniel Leader's new book, Local Breads.

Since I prefer my doughs to be lean where possible, I decided to make it without the 1/3 cup of olive oil in the dough that the recipe calls for. I only used about half a tablespoon of olive oil for spreading over the dough before baking. I also increased the amount of red grapes. The amount called for in the recipe didn't seem to be enough. 

Baking away

Profile picture for user Floydm
A couple of recent things I baked Some french bread I put together quickly for a pot of black bean soup. Not world class bread, but great for mopping up the soup. My Christmas Stollen. I used the Peter Reinhart recipe. I changed a few things, like using Amaretto instead of Grand Marnier and dried cranberries instead of raisins. I was very pleased with the results.

Trying new things

First off I must admit something.  A little while back JMonkey asked me if I still had any of my old starters going, and I told him no, they had all been ditched.  Well, come to find out, that was not entirely true.  Lurking in the way back portions of the lower fridge a Cambro container of starter was found.  So off to the internet to see what month it was when I started it.  It appears to be from back in May.  Its a little grey (well maybe more than a little) , but its still sealed nicely.  Its got a bunch of hooch on top, so I go to my Crust and Cr