Blog posts

Leviathan: Anything of immense size and power...

I had an urge to bake a monster "baguette".  Just for the fun of it.  Lacking any other reason, as if I needed one anyway.  Based on the Hamelman Pain au Levain w/WW & 60% hydration bread flour.  My version uses 125% hydration rye flour and eliminates the WW.

I included the full sized Fuji apple in the lead picture to provide a sense of size.  That's 22 inches or 59 cm.

It's been a while since my last blog post, but this one, I wanted to share.

I was on a bit of a roll making chapatis for Indian food my sweetie has been making, so I bought some atta flour.  The smallest bag I could find (Golden Temple Wheat Atta) was 10 lbs. - that's a LOT of chapatis, so I tried to figure out what else I could do with this flour.

Hi my name is Ricardo,

I have just signed up and I'm very eager to read and learn about techniques, recipes and more regarding the beautiful and magical art of baking bread.

This is a nice little loaf, good to use the cider you've found at home and are not keen on drinking...

Cider does not this bread make - as cider, beer, ale give just very subtle flavour to the bread. But the apple chunks are interesting: you actually knead in the diced apples and it takes a bit longer than expected to incorporate the moisture.

Here's the link to detailed recipe.

blueberry boule. Could have had more oven spring except it got stuck in basket.. over all crumb,crust and flavor is divine

I kept my promise last year, to make an improved version of this dessert for dad but it took one whole year! :D It is always a coincidence that dates come to our house from Dad's bestfiend's son working in Saudi Arabia. This time, they were different. They were so lusciously soft, almost spreadable and very sweet with a caramel-y taste; I'm not sure if these are Medjool dates.

I was looking at doing a loaf from Elizabeth David's  English Bread and Yeast Cookery book Potato Bread from around 19th century, I ended up having to improvise, I used wholemeal Spelt instead of wholewheatmeal @ 30% then when weighing up the 70% white flour ran out and had to add a small amount of multigrain. The potato was 13% and I also used the potato water from boiling them, with half milk for the liquid. In the book it said that this bread was particularly popular for the making of toast and that the loaf was soft ,moist and airy to which I can concur.

So here goes, my first entry.  I have been lurking around these parts for a while, gathering information and experimenting and this is the result: a 100% wholemeal sandwich loaf, using atta flour.

A 500g country loaf, from Bouchon Bakery. I continue my journey in mastering the poke test. I think this is my first loaf where the final proof was just right.

Below is a proofed demi-baguette that was marked with lines spaced 1.25" apart.  It is about to be baked without any steam as a baseline for testing the hypothesis that steam facilitates the stretching of dough. Since this loaf is not scored, we should expect it to blow out along the side.  But still, if the surface stretches in response to internal pressure generated by the expanding CO2, then we will be able to observe and measure how much stretch there is.