Blog posts

After 1 year from the birth of our son I have returned to baking bread. The steam thing for crust and rise has never worked for me with certainty, and my wife thinks that it is a bit overly dramatic to have plumes of steam in the kitchen. So, I started to get the outer surface of the loaf really wet and every 5 min(for the first 15-20 until starts rising) remove the loaf and re-wet. All this from a cold start.

rathar that scater this all over the board i will post all holiday bakinmg pics here and some of the formulas that were used

the picks first and i will edit in the formulas when i have time this is only the start and have many more days of baking left

please do not "reply" to any ot the posts with pictures . that wat i can go back when i have time and edit  in the formulas just add a post at the end of this blog page thanks

White pan bread YES that is my scale in the backround (i have been baking for a long time)

Hi Everyone:

This is my first time on this website and have a question for you all. I am a recreational baker. I bake sourdough bread every weekend and have several brotforms. Several years ago I found a beautiful brotform with a starburst design on the bottom and am looking for more designs, does anyone have any suggestions of where to find them?

I am not much of a photographer and well, I am never exactly "happy" with anything I bake. I can always outline the flaws or specific things that could stand some improvement.

But  I decided to show this week's bake - come what may - and here are the results:

Batch 1: Baguettes

Sometimes when you find a recipe, it takes a little adjusting to make it turn out how you would like.  Sometimes after lots of adjusting, you come back to the original recipe and find out it was great how it was.  This is the latter.  If you'd like to find the recipe, and method, both Jane (janedo) and David (dmsnyder), among others, have written about it quite a bit here, and have both had much success with this recipe and variations of it.  Anyway, using that as a baseline, I'll mention the adjustments I made to the method, and/or explain the pics.  Oh, and just a

Levain Honey Oatmeal Loaf

Great toasting and breakfast bread. Very tender and soft. Converted this from a commercial yeast recipe I have been making.

Breakfast of Champions!

Second Loaf got much better rise, however I should try a larger pan. These are perfect gift size.

This weekend's baking included Bernard Claytons Pain Allemande aux Fruits.  It's a marvelously fragrant bread, containing lemon zest, orange juice, anise seed, cinnamon, figs, raisins, apricots, prunes, almonds, hazelnuts, butter and other good things.  I made a double batch, since I tend to make a mess in the process of getting everything prepped.  Might as well have four loaves for my efforts as two, right?  Plus, I can give some for gifts and still have some for myself.  

I've tried an awful lot of toys and tweaks in my quest for better bread. But Eric's (ehanner) claim that he doesn't see any benefit to using a baking stone and the recent post asking about La Cloche versus a Dutch oven got me thinking: Each new trick I've learned about has been added on top of all the other tricks I've adopted. It sounds like what happens with government programs - If the one we have isn't doing the job, we don't trash it or improve it. We just create a new one to run beside the old one. I call it "Planning by Acretion."