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 Me and my friend both worked in leadership in a big box store- she began talking about opening a bakery and soon it became the topic of most of our discussions. Id never made much that didnt come out of a box and she was a hardcore scratchmade hobbyist. Fast forward a year later, her husband died unexpectedly leaving her with two young kids. It was a hard time for her, and she left the big box world to try and recover. She began texting me several months later, asking me if I would be interested in helping her start up a bakery. I said yes, and we opened in November of last year.

this was my attempt at fwsy white loaf with 80% biga. The taste and crumb are wonderful, I'm just so disappointed with the oven spring. The loaf on the left was proved in an ova, banneton and just flattened out horribly, the baguette in the middle was lovely so I ate most of that before I remembered to take pictures. The loaf on the right, I did in a round banneton. Apart from the rise on it I'm very happy. I will try again but because it's so wet, I may just continue with the white bread with poolish as my go to recipe.

The plan was to return some sort of normalcy to my baking this weekend. I was going to find a nice formula, dust off my scales and bake a loaf that I could actually say whats in it. .

It didn’t happen that way. I was running late and I needed to start the first stage of my levain build before I left for work so I ended up just throwing together some flour, water and starter. I think the last couple of bakes gave me the confidence to know that it’ll all work out.

Hello,

lately I've been having issues with my crumb. I haven't changed anything in my baking process.Flour, temps, leaven or folding is all the same. The only difference is the season.

As you can see, the top part of my loaf has a very large air pocket. This doesn't happen all the time and mostly with larger loafs (3,5 Lb)

This is an adapted redo of last week's loaf where I put way too much water in the dough. Changes were to add some leftover local organic yogurt and to only use toasted black sesame seeds as an add-in. So this is the recipe:

50 g toasted black sesame seeds

100 g yogurt 

567 g water

578 g unbleached flour 

87 g Spelt flour 

One of my earliest food memories is of eating a delicious, buttery Naan, al fresco on the patio, somewhere in an outdoor cafe in an Indian city, probably Mahabaleshwar or one of the stops on the way there from Pune, when I was just 8 years old. I can still taste it today. My senses were enchanted by this unexpected delight, both familiar and yet different to the breads of my American youth.

We are off to a BBQ tonight so decided to try out making Fougasse.

I used Paul Hollywood's recipe but made totally by hand.

500 g strong flour

10 g fine salt

7 g instant yeast

 Mix in large bowl and add 350 g tepid water and 2 tbspn olive oil.

Mixed by hand, added 1.5 tspn each finely chopped thyme, sage and Rosemary (on light side as hubby not so keen on rosemary in particular)  then did a lot of slap and folds/ stretch and fold and did get a window pane (with SD I don't usually bother).