Blog posts

Hi all 

Firstly- apologies for the lack of postings to those of you kind enough to read and post on this blog.  The past few months have been a mixture of intense activity combined with long periods of extremely frustrating inactivity.  I won't go into the specifics of why things have been progressing so slowly because I don't want to rock the boat where fragile inter-personal relationships are involved!

Hi Fellow TFL folk

I have recently returned from a 3 month holiday that took us to the UK. We flew with Emirates on the 7th May from Perth @6.00am for  a non stop flight to Dubai aboard a Boeing 777 -200LR literaly overseas for 11 hours ,a quick 1 hr 15 minutes to change planes and an Airbus A380-800 to London. a mere 6hrs and 45 minutes. arriving at local time  6.40pm  we were then taken to the Hilton hotel in Kensington for the night, an extremely long day (32 hours.)

County Fair 2012!  The prospect of a few blue ribbons is all the excuse I need to take a day off work and spend it baking instead.  Actually, I'd be happy to ditch work and bake bread with no excuse at all but that might worry people…  

I managed to put together six different breads from four different doughs this year. 

It is really odd and slightly annoying that the spell checker wants to replace kamut with kaput.  Is this a pre-judgment before the start?   But, after seeing the results that Michael Wilson achieved with his similar White Spelt Bread here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/29146/100-white-spelt-100-hydration

After recently making spice buns using the recipe for "multipurpose sweet dough" on page 130 of Crust and Crumb by Peter Reinhart with so-so results I tried a modified version of the recipe.  Others almost universally include eggs in recipes for similar doughs, but Reinhart does not.  Assuming eggs might have have been inadvertantly left off Reinhart's ingredient list, I included 2 eggs (~100g) in my latest batch.  This resulted in a much nicer dough, soft and kneadable where the previous by-the-book dough was so dry it wouldn't come together in the mixing bo

This is my first blog entry. I have visited this site a few times over the past year, but only joined today (Sept. 4,2012). My name is Christopher and a I bake mainly sourdough breads to sell at a local farmers market on Saturdays. Actually, my wife does the selling and I generally sleep in the truck.....Friday is always a long night!

I look forward to exploring this site and perhaps getting to know people on here.

Christopher

Hello all,

Maybe the forum is a better place for this, but I wanted to introduce myself and ramble a bit.  I am a new sourdough baker (and currently have no interest in yeast breads) with about 10 loaves under my belt.  In addition to being a lover of sourdough, I am also a stay-at-home dad with a 4 month old daughter, an avid cook, home-brewer, urban gardener, beekeeper, and chicken-raiser and love cycling, hiking and backpacking.  Also, I love to learn and tend to throw myself into new hobbies.

Biga acida

• 20g lievito naturale
• 200g '00' flour
• 80g cold water

Lievito dissolved in water first then mixed with flour to create a very dry dough. Pin rolled until smooth. Rolled flat, ~4mm thick, wrapped in cling film and refrigerated for 2 days before removing and left overnight until mature.

Final dough

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

Click here for my blog index.

Last weekend I baked some of the best rolls I've made to date using instant yeast instead of my usual sourdough or yeast water.  I didn't have time to refresh my starter which is why I had used the instant yeast.  I wanted to try a similar formula using a combo of sourdough starter and yeast water levain.  I decided to leave out the cream and the eggs for this version since I didn't