Blog posts

Hamelman Golden Raisin Bread, alfanso style.  With no evidence posted of this being made as baguettes, well, that opened the door for me with a welcome mat.

Hi folks. Very long time no post. I felt I just had to emerge from obscurity to let you know about my recent visit to Zita's Bang Bang Bakery in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Zita's handle on TFL is BakingBadly, which I can tell you must be read as supremely ironic!).

Fortunately, our hotel (the Mekong Angkor Boutique Hotel - great value BTW) was just 10 minutes' walk away from Bang Bang Bakery according to Googlemaps . It seemed longer and we were relieved to locate the bakery, which looks gleaming new.

This is a recipe of my own, adapted from a similar recipe I use for pancakes, which was based on a simple sourdough crumpet recipe (starter, salt, sugar, soda), which itself made half decent pancakes, or "pan-fakes" as my wife named them. The added eggs and oil make them more like real waffles (or pancakes), but are more airy and crispy than similar ones made from milk and straight flour.

Some weeks back I checked out Ken Forkish's "Flour Water Salt Yeast" ebook from the local library, and began lurking on these forums. I have learned a great deal about bread from all of your expertise here.

I read the first part of the book and thought of trying his sourdough starter recipe, at vastly smaller portions. I think he suggests 500g each per feeding, which is crazy for a beginner--why on earth would you need so much when billions of these organisms can live in a teaspoon?

I am finally settled and, with a lively rye starter bubbling away in the fridge, baking again. Happiness is...

A simple sourdough enriched with 60 grams of butter and 100 grams of raw honey purchased from a farm nearby. I have dedicated it to the lovely little Blue Chequered Cuckoo Bees that love my big rosemary bush even more than I do.

This wood oven is in Aude, France. Anyone interested should consider to have it shipped by truck . It is mobile, but there about 2 1/2 tons to pull around . 

You will see in the video the step by step of its fabrication . So anyone can do this . I invested about 5,500 euros in it , and  will sell it for double in cash or trade.

This wood oven could also heat an entire large home with very little adapting . Because it  has 300 kilos of insulation  , once hot , it stays hot, and consumes very little wood.

When I first learned of genius entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold's endeavor to create THE Ultimate Work on Bread Baking, pouring thousands of dollars in his state-of-the-art scientific laboratory plus baking station, I was rather skeptical. After Modernist Cuisine now molecular baking?

But a presentation last summer at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan/ME, with stunning photos of the process, was so convincing that I overcame my doubts (and qualms about spending so much money), and ordered my copy at Amazon.

Having found the Polenta Pepita sourdough bread recipe on this site, I set about making the bread only to realize that the hubz had used the last of the Pepita seeds on his salad!
And so the recipe "evolved" into a new one!
Pepitas were replaced by pinenuts, and with the addition of two tablespoons of Pesto sauce what should have been a Mexican ingredients loaf, became an Italian ingredients loaf.
Since the Pesto is quite high in sodium I reduced the salt to just 15g.
The flavor and crumb are both great.

I feel like I should share a HK style bread recipe on this site as someone from HK so when my mom requested some coconut buns, I decided to make it immediately. This is a kind of very typical and popular enriched bread in HK and though I only crave it at very rare occasions, my mom adores it wholeheartedly. I modified the traditional recipe by nixing butter and decreasing sugar in the dough while adding sourdough and tang zhong for flavour and tenderness respectively. An egg is skipped in the filling and condensed milk replaced the sugar.