Blog posts

When the weather gets warm it means dinners outside and bread from the grill. While the shapes can change based on the rest of the meal - they are mostly a basic pain au levain,

Part wheat and part rye levain - and then flour, water, salt. After so many loaves I still find the highest pleasure in pulling the most flavor out of those ingredients. A nice long ferment and the right mix of levain makes such a perfectly simple treat. The added flavors of the fire and outdoors is just enough to make the bread of summer a special treat.

I have been baking most of my life, the quantity and variety of baking has diminished as my family grew up and I became more careful about what I was eating. I was still baking bread in my usual way, using basic bread flour and commercial yeast, with little variety in flavour, shape or style. I make preserves every year, clementine marmalade, jam from a variety of soft fruit and indulge in the baking frenzy prior to the festive season.  I was however in a bit of a bread rut.

A wickedly indulgent bake, these are great fun to make and are insanely easy to eat! 

I have gone for a very tangy, fragrant strawberry flavour for the ganache inside and for the fondant icing.

The freshly fried crounts are rolled in a mixture of sugar and lemon powder - which gives an almost sherberty flavour. Just wonderful as it cuts through the richness of the pastries themselves!

Hey everyone!  I'm back from my big trip and I've got some stuff to share with you, mostly coming in the form of links to stuff I posted along the way on my phone. Lastly is a short video I made of the baking session I had in Moscow in the middle of May. 

Here are a bunch of photos I took, both personal and professional along the way.

In my last blog, baybakin suggested I try Peter Reinhart's SF Sourdough from Crust and Crumb. I looked at the recipe and actually, his timing works well with the summer weather as you end up baking in the morning. So I decided to try it out. This is the first time I tried retarding the final proof. I let it rise a bit like it said in the book and then put it in the fridge. I panicked a little when I observed that it kept rising for a while until it finally chilled down.

I received a note recently from Amy Goldman, who had attended one of my sourdough classes.  She and her partner, Sean Galloway, are in the process of planning a business combining a brewery and bakery in the KC area.  Right now they plan to call it The Brewkery.  Amy is already baking, using starter that I provided to each of the students.  It's a treat to think that my starter might be the base for a bakery's sourdough breads someday.

Paul

The rolls are sort of old nordic meets southern europe. The combination of the Enikorn flour, kernels, wild Greenlandic Angelica and Blueberries gives these rolls tons of aromatic, nutty sweet fragrant flavours.

 The dough was mixed directly with my "dormant" fridged sourdough starter with a approx 80% hydration level, and it took around 20 hours at room temperature for the fermentation process to kick in. They were baked at 230 degrees C for 25/30 min.

I should have posted this a long time ago since I've made this during my practicum but my laptop gave up as I was writing this while doing my practicum report. It is one of the greatest challenges I've ever faced, after typing nearly a ten page report a message just flashed saying my laptop is corrupted two days before the deadline! (What makes it worse is the policy "submit it on or before the deadline or GRADUATE NEXT YEAR!").

I know, no Turkish or Italian bread…

I thought I would confuse you….

I love this, its my new favourite!

Gorgeous…

Well, that changes each recipe, I am a fickle bread lover, faithful to no bread.

Give me eggy sweet breads and I am your slave.

I've been interested for some time in playing around with durum flour.  Between finding only the coarser semolina grind locally and being put off by the costs of mail ordering, I hadn't taken the plunge before now.  However, totally by serendipity, I happened to be in an IndoPak grocery store recently and they had a whole shelf section of various atta flours, most milled from durum wheat.  A 20-pound bag (only $12.99) followed me home and has been silently taunting me these past two weeks as other things kept me from baking.