Blog posts

My wonderful engineering husband was watching me do calculations by hand yesterday. He does everything on the computer.  Anyway, he was kind enough to write a small program on an excel spreadsheet that does my calculations for me. I can share it with anyone that would like, if you'd like to send me a message for a request. It's so simple! You can input the total amount of either dough or flour that you want and the percent of the different ingredients, the calculator will fill in the number of grams for each ingredient for you.

If your starter is over fermented... Don't mix the final dough with it...  This happened to me again this morning...  I proceeded to mix the final dough with the overfermented starter...  The dough never came together and remained a sticky mess...  Yuk!

I should have just tossed out the starter and started over and not wasted 2kg more of flour...

The Honey Whole Wheat pan loaf from Advanced Bread and Pastry is made with a white levain, more as a pre-ferment for flavor than for leavening. It also uses instant yeast. It is otherwise 100% whole wheat. I used KAF Organic WW.

I've been very curious about other bakers' enthusiasm for rye breads, which, from their appearance and my past experience, I could only associate with tree bark and the nasty tasting caraway seeds. Mr. Hamelman's 90% rye bread has completely changed my impression.  Not only did this bread turn out moist, but it also had that complex, mild, tangy aftertaste which evolved slowly and lingered in my mouth. This was a new experience for my taste buds.

It has been so hot that I am taking a break from baking.  I went out the other day for a walk and when I spotted these birds (below), I turned back to get my camera.  As I moved closer to the birds to take my shots, I noticed the color of the green became whiter and whiter because of the scorching sun. 

We've been baking and cooking for the past week for our annual open house. We started doing this four years ago to share our homemade wines and brews with our friends and neighbors. With my new-found interest in improving my baking skills, my wife dubbed this year's efforts "Breads and Spreads". We served two sourdoughs, baguettes, vollkornblot, and light rye. We also offered a potpourri of rye sourdoughs: one with walnuts, one with walnuts and blue cheese, and the last with chestnuts and feta cheese.

This was a busy baking weekend for me.  Thursday night I started the levain for a batch of "my" sourdough bread, which I baked on Friday night.  It turned out quite acceptably in the end, but I was most excited about the maiden use of my new 1 pound oval willow proofing baskets that I picked up on a Christmas week field trip to SFBI/TMB Baking.  I made this dough with a pretty low (64%) hydration because it was my first use of these baskets.  I did not want the dough to stick to them and mess them up before I could get them seasoned and broken in.  Given that, I had

The couple of folks who actually read my posts may have noticed that I seem to be posting at crazy hours.

I've been working in the Ryukyu (or Okinawa) and although beginning to suffer from baking withdrawal have been absolutely blown away by the beautiful breads in the nearby department store.  Unfortunately, to a Western palate, many of these breads are tasteless - but they sure are beautiful.

I finally bribed a colleague who has both a camera and photography skills to take pictures.

After leaving the bagels in cold storage for the day, I start prepping for the Boil and Bake portions of my Bagels.

I begin with a 20 quart Aluminum Stock Pot about 3/4 filled with water to which I then add 3 Tablespoons of Baking Soda.

While this is heating up I preheat my oven up to 500'f.

To the relief of many I imagine, I've decided to start maintaining my blog here at TFL rather than post a new thread in a forum every time I bake somethig I want to post about, be it for success or failure. I will not go back and add old pictures here that are already posted elsewhere, so this will not be a complete history of my baking.  That's okay, because some of the earliest should be history, and should be left that way.