Blog posts

Last week, I participated in the Nelson Mandela Challenge Bake and ended up with a delicious if dense bread. We were not eating it very quickly so I decided to turn it into crackers. The density was right and with a few minutes in a 350F convection oven, my dense bread turned into delicious Cranberry and Pumpkin Seed crackers.

Sometimes you get tired of the big loaves and fancy something smaller, a housing for a cheese sandwich or a bacon butty. Here’s a selection of some of my favourite bread rolls, in no particular order...

After seeing David’s sourdough white bread post this week, poor Lucy got the willies for it worse than ever.  When you don’t eat much white bread, the ramifications of missing it can be dangerous when the White Bread Willies strike.  I tried to get Lucy back on her trans humanist project since the sun burns hotter every day and it won’t be long before the oceans boil away and we need to be permanently somewhere else – not that she isn’t most of the time anyway.

A few days ago David Snyder posted his version of the San Francisco Baking Institute's pain au levain (almost) all AP flour batard.  Seeing this as the equivalent of an open invitation, I decided it was time to strike quickly.  And I'm so glad I did.

Freshloafians,
Here are a couple of videos I made at my last two markets, one in Bozeman and the other two days ago in Big Sky, MT.  Enjoy ;)

-Mark

Having decided that I'm tired of trying to work with sloppy wet doughs, particularly in large batches, I've revised several of the recipes I use so that the overall dough hydration is in the range of 70% to 72%. This is my first experiment with the Harvest bread from FWSY, and it's a keeper!

Tartine Bread - After several pounds of failed dough, I finally was able to produce a loaf of Tartine Bread.

Well, I nearly ruined a large bake (eleven loaves) of my best deli-style rye bread today, simply by following the recipe instead of my own smarts. I've baked this bread many times (I've got two customers who absolutely love it and order large batches fairly regularly).

A relatively new TFL member recently asked how to make a sourdough bread. His description of the desired characteristics brought to mind a bread we made in the San Francisco Baking Institute Artisan II Workshop on sourdough baking. It was a decidedly French-style pain au levain with minimal acidic acid tanginess but a creamy, sweet complex flavor. It was the preferred bread of the SFBI faculty. The special features of this white bread were a liquid levain fed every 12 hours that made up about 30% of the total flour in the final dough.

I couldn't wait another day to order Tartine 3, and when I went to buy it, I found a "used like new" copy for under $12.  Must have been my day.  I made the first recipe using starter I had on hand, feeding twice daily preceding the bake, and used a young levain.  I'm not sure why the recipe calls for twice as much levain to be made as the recipe calls for.  Also, dutch ovens always burn the bottoms.