Blog posts

Life's gotten the better of my time lately and Charlie's been well neglected in the fridge.. but thankfully he doesn't mind.. that said I decided to send him on journey and now part of Charlie is baking up a pizza storm in Virginia Beach with a good friend of mine..

Meanwhile, I finally got around to baking last week and made a Tartine whole wheat loaf and made Danni's version of the Swiss Raisin Muesli bread that I've been trying to replicate. Danni - great recipe..

I was suddenly craving white sandwich bread. That’s very uncommon for me as I always prefer whole grain sourdough bread. Then, I figured out I actually wasn’t craving any white sandwich bread but the store bought purple rice coconut white sandwich bread. Easy solution: drop the white flour and sub in whole wheat, put in some purple rice flour (the original version only mix in cooked rice) and include a coconut kaya jam filling. You get something not only healthier but much more flavorful (coconut milk in both the dough and filling!).

This is a small loaf built with a levain made with 1.5 g starter, 30 g water and 30 g bread flour. The levain was left to mature for about 12 hours on the counter at about 30 C room temperature. It was not used at its peak, since I could see that it receded way before I arrived home from work.

It's been a while since I baked a porridge bread so it was time to get to it.  I wanted to add a little sweetness of dates into the porridge and of course some roasted smashed skin on potatoes didn't hurt the crazy moist and soft crumb.  I had some left-over grilled onions so in that went as well.  The dates and onions both dissolved into the final dough but you could certainly taste their contribution in the final bake.

This one makes great grilled bread and is fantastic with some butter or cheese.

There are 2 reasons why I am celebrating!

First is, it's my dad's 72nd birthday and second is...

The one who is typing this post that you are currently reading is NOW a PROFESSIONAL LICENSED TEACHER!!!

Hello to all you wise sages out there.  Long post, but I'm really hoping you amazing bakers out there can ease my recent torment!

Hi bakers!

I'm experimenting with sweet sourdoughs and I arrived at this formula after testing another one with less sugar. 

This loaf has 100gr of fine unrefined cane sugar and 150gr of toasted walnuts and I think that the sweetness now is on point.

I used half wholegrain flour and half white bread flour, the fermentation was a little bit slower than my normal schedule due to the presence of the sugar (I asked Maurizio Leo and he said so, I thought it was the opposite! Silly me). 

Hi bakers!

Today I come here half happy and half unhappy. I'm happy because I baked my first loaf of sourdough using 50% of khorasan whole wheat flour (and I think that this flour is aromatic in such a particular way that reminds me of chamomile) but I'm not so happy because maybe I let the fermentation process gone too far and the bread came out a little bit flat :(. 

After one loaf of 50% sprouted and whole grain bread she went back to a white bread this week.  Yeah, she picked one that we don’t do very often at 83% hydration, it had some whole grain in it that was semi-related to durum semolina, we needed something to put pork inside with cheese and then into the panini press and at least it was SD.

Apparently, these are inspired by Ian aka the King of Buns as referred to by dabrownman. As I can never allow myself to follow a recipe exactly, of course I have changed things up to show my own character. Unlike Ian, who blended the cream cheese with the dough, I put in chunks of cream cheese. Also, candied orange peels and sunflower seeds are incorporated to make the rolls more interesting. Rye flours are usually used along with orange and earl grey, yet to break the tradition, I chose to use barley flour (which resembles more of Ian’s rolls as well).