Blog posts

For some time now I've been baking an Ale & Yeast Poolish bread, originally from Richard Bertinet's "Crust". I make it with my husband's home-brewed light hoppy ale, and it is a customer favourite (and family & friends too). It's a delightful all-purpose bread, good for sandwiches, toast, with soup or cheese or whatever. And it is probably the best-behaved dough I've ever worked with. It seems infallible!

As a student, baking has become a wonderful way to work and create in a different way as well as relieve stress! These past few months have been full of final papers and exams, but with some nice baking breaks. I thought I would post the photos from a few loaves lately!

Two of the sourdough miches I bake most often!

At least once a week, I bake bread.  One of our favorites is the ciabatta (slipper, in Italian).  But, yesterday, I decided to revisit a book I purchased a while back and baked boule (ball, in French). The last bread I baked from that book was an Italian Semolina Bread.

I

Once again, I'm experimenting with baking high hydration sourdoughs in loaf pans. This time I did the Country Blonde from FWSY. I did it mostly to make customers happy (some of whom, for some reason, find it difficult to cope with slicing a boule), but I also wanted to make it easier for me! It's not bad shaping and then transferring a very wet dough when you're doing one loaf at a time, but when I'm trying to cope with a large puddle of dough for 8 loaves, it's just too much trouble!

I have friends from Bosnia that have a huge lamb roast every year, and every year there is a discussion about the Somun and how the store bought bread doesn't live up to fresh made.  I've decided to break my own rule of not attempting to compete with a childhood memory and take up this challenge and attempt to get something close or at least better than the store bread for next year's lamb roast.

Recipe #1193 in M. Hoffmann, H. Lydtin, "Bayrisches Kochbuch" Birken publising, 53 Ed., 1986

Simple yeast dough (ok, I don't have milk or butter in my household, so I substituted it with water and peanut oil, which according to my sister would make it a pizza dough and according to my wife it's a cake since it has eggs and sugar).

Wikipedia tells me that Rohrnudeln are also called Buchteln and originate from Bohemia, Austria, Slovak, Slovenia and Hungaria.

I have been struggling for months with batards, scoring and getting proper bloom. Well, I have had success two bakes in a row now as a result in two new procedures. I would like to do a shout out to alphonso for the video he posted a while back. Thanks alan, your video has been most helpful to me!

The two small changes were to put the loaf into the fridge for the last 10 minutes of proofing and dipping my lame in water prior to scoring. Ear on the first bake at 200 grams and a half ear on this one at 370 grams. I will call this loaf VanGogh as it only has a half an ear.

My dad is now a septuagenarian! He just turned 70, thank God! We're truly blessed! I've been busy this past two days preparing for and celebrating my dad's birthday.

This week as i was looking for a loaf to try for BBD #83 [http://www.kochtopf.me/bbd-83-brot-spezialmehl-bread-special-flour] a lovely looking polenta sourdough recipe caught my eye.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/38493/polenta-pepita-sourdough

My formula:

This loaf has sprouted flour that consists of Millet, Eincorn, Buckwheat, and Barley as well as a soaker of left over bolted rye flour from last week's bake and some fresh milled corn meal. Most of the hydration comes from YW and there is a small amount of starter added as well as some AP and VWG. The vital wheat gluten was added because last time such a mix was attempted there was not enough structure to the dough, we don't keep bread flour on hand and had to dig the VWG out of the freezer where it  had been languishing for over a year maybe two..