Blog posts

I hope you see this and respond Pat, I read your tip about the butter frame and want to ask a question.

I made some banana breads tonight. They were delicious – better than ever before with some tweaking the baking temperature. As I was tasting it, I got to thinking about the book from which I got the recipe.

Banana Bread from Crust & Crumb

Banana Bread crumb

I having been baking off and on for a long time, including making bread, but I finally got serious about it last fall.  This blog will chronicle my journey in the world of bread baking.  Warning:  I will be going into baker's percentages and other technical aspects of baking the bread, so this blog may be very boring ;-)

My new go-to loaf is Hamelman's light rye. I leave out the caraway seeds (never aquired a taste) and use whole rye. 

This week, my baking schedule was thrown off, so I had to improvise. Hamelman's recipe calls for an 18-hour sourdough starter, a 1-hour bulk fermentation, and a 1-hour proof before baking. Due to time constraints, I had to put the dough in the fridge overnight after shaping.

Did a 20 loaf batch last month, hand kneaded 10.4 kilograms (23#), lot of fun. Looking for my baker's sheet from that job to post more details.

I have been after a good English Muffin since I started baking breads 2 years ago. I tried the BBA recipe, too bread like, crumb is even and soft, good for a dinner roll, not an English muffin. I tried Alton Brown's recipe. Simple, and gives lots of holes. However the crumb is more like a crumpt. In addition, with a very short rise, AB's EM lacks a little flavor.

I posted two great videos at my blog, about shaping and scoring a baguette. I was hoping to post them here but can't get the embedded videos from youtube to work, so just go to the link.

It's the third time lucky for me making croissant. Well, sort of.

I think my third time yielded decent croissants but they are still far from what I want to achieve. I'm now on the mission to practice making croissants every week until I can make it well. My partner is quite pleased to learn this, as well as our neighbors who are more than happy to be guinea pigs.

I've just gotten back after a month travelling, most of which was spent in Vietnam. One of the most notable influences of French colonisation is the proliferation of baguettes in the Vietnamese diet. In Saigon (that's what the locals call their manic city, and it's a far more romantic and exotic name than Ho Chi Minh City, so I'm going with it), most baguettes are the rice flour ones that appear in Vietnamese bakeries all over Australia, and probably the States.

I suspect that I'm not the only one that has had an impulse or two to color out side the lines. This time, I got caught up in reading too much and just had to do something I hadn't found in my books. I had read about using using large preferments that were bigas or poolishs but I had to try a pate fermentee. I wanted some bread to go with the all purpose red sauce I was working on and thought that I could make pizza dough for the next night in the same batch. No problem, right?