Blog posts

Having some friends over for a cookout tonight and made some hamburger buns and hot dog rolls....and marshmallows for our s'mores!  I hate to have to buy the garbage marshmallows at the store, so I love making my own.

The following is a description of how I maintain my 100% hydration (1:1 flour:water by weight) starter. The term 100% hydration refers to the baker's percentage of water in the starter, i.e. the water in the starter is 100% of the weight of the flour in the starter.

This maintenance regime assumes that your starter is already healthy, fresh, and active. This is not what I would do to "start a starter", but rather it is the maintenance regime I follow to store, revive, and use my starter over time.

Here is my Mocha Java bread.  The bread has the color of WW but only contains white bread flour.  It is infused with chocolate and coffee.  The crust is soft, with a very soft creamy crumb that has melted chocolate and caramel throughout.  With a nice flavor of coffee to go with the chocolate.

Sponge:

Sourdough Whole Grain Sandwich Loaf

With warm weather and more time spent in the garden than in the kitchen these days, I finally decided to give the "no-preheat" method a try since ehanner, crumb bum, sourdough-guy, and many others seem to like the results and the ease (not to mention energy savings).

We're having fun on the farm! With the Mother's Day picnic coming up I decided to bake my own version of a filled braid. I admired the fruit filled braids and loved Floyd's suggestion that a savory filling with a different dough would be good. A search of the BBA formulas led me to use Pain de Campagne because it is said to be suited to shaped loaves; never disappoints. I followed Reinhart's steps with the exception that I used an overnight retarding of the dough after the first partial rise to better fit my schedule.