Blog posts

   I have recently become a big fan of the high hydration doughs with an overnight cold fermentation. The morning I took this dough out of the fridge, I cut it with my bench knife and flipped the smooth side down on my well floured couche. The knife left a scar on the edges of the bread which left an opening for the bread to bloom without the need for scoring. This may have been my best crust yet. It carmelized very dark and crackly and the taste was fabulous.

Congratulations on your purchase!  I have been using my DLX for about a year now, and I must say I love it. 

Even though it is quite powerful, it's super slow lower speeds work for me quite well. 

Lately I've been experimenting with Semolina flours in my sandwich bread.  This flour is easily over worked, and sereral sources recommend hand mixing.  Even here though, with careful attention, my DLX performs quite nicely.  It makes mixing day almost as much fun as baking days. 

They call it the most important meal of the day, and I tend to agree with them. Get off to a good start, for instance with your morning newspaper, a cup of black coffee and some still-hot-from-the-oven breakfast rolls, and you're at least halfway there. Yesterday, I mixed, bulk fermented and shaped some mini-batards from a batch of Hamelman's "Semolina bread with a whole-grain soaker" formula (p. 137 in "Bread"). This delicious and simple formula is extremely versatile; I've used it for regular breads, rolls and some uttely delicious, crunchy baguette-shaped loaves in the past.

I have to give a shout out to Dan Lepard for the inspiration on this bread. You see, I really like tamarind so I've been kicking around the idea in the back of my head that I would like to make some bread with tamarind in it. However, I wasn't taking the thought too seriously given the tartness of tamarind fruit. Then the other day, I happened to be randomly perusing Dan Lepard's website, danlepard.com, and I came across his recipe for a tamarind date cake. I thought, oooh, that sounds delicious... and then lightning struck! Of course!

Actually a few of these are from Montpellier too, like the first few:

We just got back from our first trip to Europe with kids, our first trip overseas in nearly twelve years. We spent most of it in southern France but flew in and out of Paris.

Today's baking was my (less sweetened) version of the German Many Seed Bread from "Whole Grain Baking". Instead of a soaker and a biga I used just the soaker with stretch & fold technique for the first time, adding some more water. The breads turned out really nice, I think it's an improvement.

Sorry, no crumb shot - these breads were for sale.

I made my San Joaquin Sourdough today with a couple of modifications.