Blog posts

Apologies to, and inspiration by, Carole King.

After the success of my "Monster Multigrain Miche", I went on to develop sourdough rye breads. Again. Failing repeatedly across the span of 2 years, I finally achieved what I call "Strong Rye".

Another baguette attempt, this time using Trevor Wilson's easy SD baguette recipe.  I doubled the recipe and made 4 x 350 g baguettes and a small boule with remaining dough.   It was a bit cool and dough was slow, I got hung up on time so I think I did not bulk ferment enough. Still, baguettes are a big improvement on last lot, I used my new larva rocks so although my steam technique still needs improvement I think there was definitely more steam in the oven.  The boule didn't fare so well and although I scored the top, I obviously didn't score suffiently.

I baked a batch of six Sunflower Flaxseed Levains from Tartine 3 this morning. I made the dough last night and let it sit in the basement (my version of 'cellar temperature') overnight, then shaped it and proofed in baskets this morning. It proofs a lot more quickly than the five hours Robertson recommends so I had to have the oven and the cast iron pots hot and ready. The dough was quite sticky this morning but stretchy, and it shaped well into boules. These were 750 grams (wet dough weight) boules, baked in 3 quart pots. Turned out very nice!

After quite a few white breads in a row I was worried that Lucy may have gone to the white side and then she came up with this one.  Originally it was supposed to be a 40% rye Jewish Corn Bread but that got lost in the translation of having to replenish our very old NMNF stiff rye starter.

Hi it's Andrew here, I have been using fresh compressed yeast, And my bread is coming of yellow ! can anyone please help me !

This is a relatively simple bread made with fresh milled Kamut flour, KAF Millet flour and KAF Toasted Almond Flour.  I added some smoked pecan maple syrup for extra sweetness which complimented the nutty flavor of the almond flour.

All in all, this one came out very tasty and made some great grilled bread with olive oil for dinner this week.

The crumb could have been a bit more open but it was nice and moist.

Leviathan: Anything of immense size and power...

I had an urge to bake a monster "baguette".  Just for the fun of it.  Lacking any other reason, as if I needed one anyway.  Based on the Hamelman Pain au Levain w/WW & 60% hydration bread flour.  My version uses 125% hydration rye flour and eliminates the WW.

I included the full sized Fuji apple in the lead picture to provide a sense of size.  That's 22 inches or 59 cm.

It's been a while since my last blog post, but this one, I wanted to share.

I was on a bit of a roll making chapatis for Indian food my sweetie has been making, so I bought some atta flour.  The smallest bag I could find (Golden Temple Wheat Atta) was 10 lbs. - that's a LOT of chapatis, so I tried to figure out what else I could do with this flour.