Blog posts

hello,

new guy here from NJ! i am new to baking and look forward to learning about bread from all the cool and knowledgable members here. my first goal to achieve is to create a tasty and nice looking baguette, sourdough, and raisin walnut. also id like to learn bagels, dinner rolls, and sandwich/hoagie rolls! i have the BBA book and just recently purchase the PR whole wheat book. look fwd to learning as much as possible! below is what i baked on sunday.

PR Whole wheat trisitional bread, very good first try

I had a craving for carrot cake the other day.  It was one of those cravings you try to ignore, but in the end you submit because, like it or not, you did not try all that hard to avoid it in the first place.

I've never made bread dough and always thought it required a special gift to make. After hours of browsing, I finally found this great website and decided to give a try. Lesson 1 gave me the basics about the ingradients. That made me jump straight to lesson 2 to officially break the ice.

This is the rising dough :

The result was great!

Gave this recipe a try-half a batch. Started the whole process late afternoon yesterday. I did not have the 10 grain cereal, so subbed grapenut cereal. Used orange oil in place of orange zest. The dough accomodated about 2.25 cups of flour. In spite of this the dough turned out stiff.

It is my girlfriends birthday today so I decided to make her a special breakfast! I had eyeballed the butter scones from Advanced Bread and Pastries before but seeing as how they are so rich I didn't want to make them save for a special occasion. Here in sweden a scone is more akin to Soda Bread than the sweetish style scones you get in Britain och America.

What is a better choice: an aluminized steel loaf pan that has an oily/non stick surface or a stainless steel pan?  We've been using the former kind for a while and are happy with it, but I'm concerned with how long they'll last.  I have no data on the stainless steel pans.  How well do they work, how long will they last?  We're about to order a large quantity (for us) and I would rather not make any foolish mistakes.  Any help is appreciated.

Thanks, Tanya

Very wet here this weekend.  Good for rainbows...

and also good for baking!

I made buttermilk cinnamon rolls this afternoon...

and a couple of loaves of my daily bread to eat with a big pot of soup this evening.

Lovely.

www.evilshenanigans.com

Have you ever craved something, let's say a cookie, and could not find a recipe that looked like it would be any good?

Actually just 'pain de provence', using Floyd's recipe from years ago, with a local liquer from the town which is a.k.a. "Bois le duc"/Duketown. I went easy on the herbs as well. This is one of the best breads I have made so far, I am really proud of it. Also, I almost gave up half way, the dough was too sticky and I was under time pressure. Never a good thing with 'new' breads.

The pain de provence is the larger bread, just as big as the basket itself. Wish I could make a closeup..
The smaller is just a sourdough, which is finally rising a bit. Great taste.

I usually only have time to make our favourite sourdough each weekend, but this weekend we have had rain and cold winds which cancelled some plans.  So I decided to make a recipe I hadn't tried before -Golden Raisin Bread - from Jeffrey Hamelman's "Bread".  This took me out of my comfort zone somewhat but I enjoyed the challenge and will try to take on a new recipe regularly.  I think I've grown in confidence thanks to this site.