Blog posts

One of my Christmas presents last year was Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.  While I've wanted to get beyond just reading the book and starting to bake from it, life has kept me well supplied with other things to do.  There was the completion of the rye bread test bakes for Stan Ginsberg's upcoming book, a vacation to San Diego, a freezer well-stocked with bread that needed to be eaten before more was baked, test bakes of hot cross buns and Easter bread and salt sticks for some upcoming classes, and, well, you get the picture.

Yesterday was a busy day of baking.

Yeah... I bet you're wondering what I do with all of this bread.

-i eat it

-I give some away

-I try to stuff it into a freezer that is already packed with bread

It does get used, but I think I do need to try to slow down a little with the baking. Smaller batches would also probably help. Maybe if I get a permit for selling at farmer's markets, it could be fun to sell it. 

When last we left my Field Blend #2 first-time-out-of-the-cannon tome, I mentioned that there were lessons learned – aren’t there always?  And that the next time through I’d be applying the scaling, mixing and shaping with my own two grubby hands, now that my sister in law had just about enough of us and skipped town ;-) .

Hello, bakers! Yesterday, I had an appointment at 1, but I really wanted to do some baking. My solution? Get up really early. And it worked. I did have to drink coffee throughout the day, but it was worth it.

For fun, I sifted some whole wheat flour that I had ground to see how the dough behaves (more like white flour or more like whole wheat).  I liked the result and used most of the removed bran to coat the rolls with all over.  Taste and crumb were very good.  I chose to make rolls to maximize the amount of bran that could coat the bread.

Hi Freshloafers.  It’s been a while since my last post, despite best intentions, and I decided that rather than put it off further, I thought I’d submit a bit of a “catch up” post that has a grab bag of quasi-recent bread experiments.  Forgive the lack of commentary or detail on process – happy to answer any questions, of course – but life & work have kept me busier than usual, so I haven’t had as much time for weekend baking or chronicling as I would like.

I don't have the book in front of me, but there's a single sentence in FWSY where Forkish describes serving a traditional French version of pain au chocolat in his bakery: Not the chocolate croissant with which I was familiar, but instead a simple slice of bread with a swipe of butter and a sprinkle of dark chocolate. 

That's what I served to my coworkers today, after a very long week of weather-related stress. 

4 Grain Sprouted Sourdough with Altus, Scald, Toadies & Porter - Going Darker

 Taking last week’s bake to the Darker Side seemed right up Lucy’s alley.  We doubled the whole grains to 61% and upped the hydration to 83%.  So, I’m happy it was twice as healthy!  This weeks scald/bake was a half hour longer and included Toadies too so it should be darker.

Started these guys at 7am on Wednesday, took them out of the oven a couple of hours ago.

I'm fairly happy with the shaping, and although I didn't get impressive grigne and no ears are present, I feel like the scoring was OK, I think other factors contributed to the low bloom. First time attempting an epi, made quite a mess of that, obviously need a lot more practice there!