Blog posts

This really should have been waited till Easter monday, Since I have been craving for it for soooo long, so who cares.

I have used the formula posted by Rossnroller . The only Changes Ive made to his formula is reduced the sugar to 30g instead of 40g and used a 50% wholewheat starter which push the wholegrain to 22%. 

Ive also added a 30min Autolyse and added salt right before the second knead. 

Every year before Easter, our church's baking guild will gather a group of volunteers, bake Hot Cross buns, and sell them as a Church fund raiser.  This year we baked 60 dozen buns over a 2 day period. We used the recipe from Hammelman's Bread mixing 4 dozen at a time. We nicknamed the volunteers, most who are not bakers, the holy rollers.    It is a great way to have some fun together as well as introducing folks to what baking is about. 

  I love potatoes in my bread and rolls so I figured it was time to try them in pretzel rolls.  I had to make this recipe twice as the first time I didn't compensate enough for the moisture in the potatoes and the dough was way too hydrated.  The rolls didn't come out the right consistency so I made them again and cut the water back and they came out perfect.

We try to bake some kind of gefilta fish based loosely on Wolfgang Pucks Passover recipe here.

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/passover-gefilte-fish-recipe.html

 Last year’s was tilapia, with various Mexican green chilies wrapped in collard greens and set into cabbage to look like little cabbages that were covered in fish stock and veggies.  We made 6 large ones and they were terrific here

Now that my baby starter is quite active and I've had a few successful naturally leavened loaves, I wanted to try making some Tartine bread. I dined at Bar Tartine recently and the idea of baking my own oat porridge bread was stuck in my head. I used breaducation's formula for the Tartine oat porridge bread.

Let's just say mine turned out nothing like breaducation's beautiful bread. My dough was very wet and sticky and I had trouble handling it. You can see that my loaf hardly rose at all.

So, one of the nice things about Tartine Bread is Chad Robertson's recipes for use of the day old bread.  Sometimes one has a half loaf in the bread box and a fresh loaf just out of the oven.  It is difficult to eat that "day old bread" when there is a fresh loaf sitting out calling my name.

His french toast recipe calls for a 1.5 inch thick slice of bread. That is a lot of bread.  But, fortunately, I had enough old bread to make two slices.

It has been a while since I last posted here on TFL. I have been quite busy, and there was much in my life to take care of, that I hadn’t had spare time to follow the wonderful bread adventures of TFL members.

As some of you may remember, I had missed my chocolate class back in January this year, and planned for a makeup class in order to complete my amateur pastry course. Yes, I’ve finally done it. Enjoyable, could have been. Messy?, you bet, but it is over now. One more theoretical exam in baked goods, and I’ll be officially done.

Since last summer when I first tried making pizza on my outdoor grill using unglazed quarry tiles, I have been itching to try again.  This time I decided to do a simple Margherita pizza so the crust would be the star of the show.  Homemade tomato sauce, bocconcini, basil.  Crust had organic stone ground whole wheat with a touch of rye.  The two medium sized pizza's turned out nicely, with a nice sweet tone in the crust due to the whole wheat flour.  I tend to like thin crust pizzas, with a larger cornicione (outer edge crust).

A good friend of mine got a chance to work with a very reputable baker and brought me this formula for PDC as he called it.  It was his favorite of the loaves there and I had to give it a go.  Let's start with the fact that I misread my formula and came up short 600 g of H20.  I noticed the dough could take some more hydro and got 200 g in at the mix time but after re-reading the formula I noticed my botch.  So the dough should have been 82% hydration but ended at 73% which is a ways off the mark.  

In my never ending crusade to figure out how to open up my crumb, I have tinkered with every formula, mixing, folding, and shaping variable, with some moderate success, but never consistent.  Yesterday I tried something new: I put my stone on the bottom of the oven, above the flame, where I normally put it for pizza, at 490 degrees, and voilá!