Blog posts

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

  I've made a similar bread before and loved the way the dates add a natural sweetness to the bread.  This time I decided to add some more natural sweetness with some caramelized onions.

I made one large miche style loaf but you can easily make 2 loaves out of this formula.

The final bread as before came out great with a moderately open crumb and a nice dark chewy crust.  The dates really add such a unique pleasant flavor to the overall bread and that combined with the sweetness of the caramelized onions really make this a bread worth trying.

Today I baked a couple loaves of the Overnight Whole Grain Sourdough from the Handbook recipe section. It certainly looks good, and smells divine! I'll cut it later (or tomorrow) to check the crumb, but happy so far! Bulk fermented overnight, then shaped and proofed for 2-3 hours in baskets. Onto peels, slashed and baked with steam on the granite slabs. The whole wheat starter smelled fairly sour and there's a good dollop of rye flour in the loaf so I'm interested to taste it!

Mission accomplished!!!  Thank you all for your input!!!

The winner! 

  Made with wheat bran levain, inspired by Dabrownman's great idea...

I finally achieved a proper, (if off-center) ear on one of the loaves, so I'm overjoyed.  I thought I made deep enough cuts into the round loaf, but apparently not.  I really enjoyed incorporating a soaker, and this dough was quite easy to work with.  The crumb seems good to me, but I welcome any criticisms.  It felt like cheating using both levain and commercial yeast, but I love the recipe.  Changes made from previous Hamelman Vermont SD bake:

Foreground is cinnamon, sugar chocolate babka. I enjoyed the last one so much it was time to bake another. I used 2 x 300 gram balls of dough to roll out the babka. The remaining 253 grams of pulla dough was used to roll out the blueberry cream cheese bread front right.  In behind is a ciabatta style loaf with 20% durham semolina which resulted in a really nice snap to the crust!

Well, I was on my way to the ski hill and then it started raining.

Happy baking! Ski

We recently had a surplus of eggs and we need to find ways on how to use them before they go bad. Our chickens are really prolific layers that their eggs can't even fit anymore in our fridge for storage. We made the usual, salted eggs and flan (with whole eggs) but there are still many left and more are added each day. We made egg salad with about three dozen eggs but there were still seven remaining. I think this is the perfect time for me to try an egg bread and make an experiment.

Now, this is not a bread recipe, not even a recipe using sourdough, but I felt I had to post it, as they turned out so tasty!

My version of Russian Blini, can be served with anything from caviar to chocolate spread. Full recipe on my blog here 

Missed St. Patrick's day with this one but that was the inspiration. It has a good presence of fresh ground sprouted rye flour, about 33%, and soaked barley berries, 20%. There is also some WWW and AP with a total whole grain percentage of about 67%. Used starter, a bulk fermentation retard, and an egg wash with a caraway seed sprinkle. Baked on a cast iron tray covered for the first bit by a stainless steel mixing bowl. Can hardly wait to cut this one but will restrain for several hours. In retrospect should have used stout for the soaking and hydrating.

Stu