Blog posts

For Thanksgiving we were visiting my wife's family in North Carolina as we always do and as usual we brought have our kitchen with us so we could bake for the main feast.

This year I made a double batch of my German Sourdough Pumpernickel Pretzel Rolls and another version of my Tangzhong Onion rolls.  I changed up some of the flour and also added some shredded cheese in the mix for added flavor.

I had been looking for bakers to bake my bread in bulk for me but never seemed to find the right one.  There were various reasons why each baker wasn't right and why I wasn't the right situation for them. Last Spring, before giving up the whole idea of selling my breads commercially, I gave it one last shot: could I develop a Gluten-Free Sourdough Bread Mix?

It took me 2 months to develop a user-friendly, genuine, sourdough bread mix. The mix takes about 24 hours to complete, less time than making gluten-free sourdough bread from scratch, about 3-4 days.

For some reason my apprentice and I had a hard time keeping the mobile Sinclair Bakery’s Potato rolls, that we were making at the same time,  out of the this week’s SD bread.

I have been meaning to make pulla for awhile, ever since various intriguing posts on the subject.   I followed a combination of jarkkolaine (formula) and Julie J.  I only had cardamon pods, so sort of stripped them and crushed them in my coffee grinder.   Not so easy.   The cardamon makes this incredibly tasty.

Hi Folks

i was reminded by work colleauges that i had not baked for a little while and that they were feeling deprived of some nice bread. So with that thought ringing in my ears and the thought that i hadn't baked since i had changed my feeding regime for the sourdough culture  where it now spends more time in the cool room than out, coming out for a couple of days for a few feeds and going back in the fridge for a longer stay.

The lead in picture shows that we baked Nisu plus other breads... Helen's picture leads in with her braided Nisu breads and her Alaskan Sourdough. We had a great time baking these breads and decided that we LOVE the dough from this Finnish Nisu (Nissua) bread... it will be the go to recipe for future sweet breads and cinnamon rolls... in fact, today I am going to make a raisin swirl bread with the same recipe.  

Here are our pictures of how this bread came out for us....

Down to my last few weeks in Canada and am now trying to clear a bit of my remaining pantry. Still have a little of the spent grains from the previous spent grain bake which I decided to incorporate in last week's bake. And why not throw in a little beer to make it a beer bread something which I wanted to try for a long time. Recipe was adapted from Dan Lepard's barm bread.

Barm:
250g Ale (I used a home-brewed Honey Basil Ale)
50g Flour
4 Tsp Starter

This is essentially my pizza dough recipe except that I added an extra teaspoon of yeast. I let it rise until double in size. Punched it down, divided it into fourths, formed flattened balls and placed them in a 9x9 pan. Let them rise until doubled again and baked them at 350F for 25 minutes. Sprayed them with butter flavor oil immediately as they came out of the oven, and broke them into individual buns to cool.

They had a nice crumb for burger buns and toasted easily. Tasted great!

Now, this is a first for me - a golden Christmas pudding - golden almonds, golden fruit and actual edible GOLD!!!

Full review and pictures here

Recent bakes:

11/27/13 - 100% Whole Spelt Pandoro-Like Thing

This is a continuation of the 100% spelt brioche that I made last week or so…  I wanted to see what more butter, eggs, and sugar would do using spelt flour...

11/24/13

Rye SD

100g - Water

50g - Organic whole rye flour (Arrowhead MIlls)

48g - Rye SD (100% hydration)