Blog posts

I LOVE McCormick & Schmick's bread. Not sure if their bread varies by what state they are in... This one is in Chicago on Wacker.

This lovely bread has soft golden brown crust and is nice and fluffy. It has a sour dough/vinegar taste to it.

I have baked sourdough bread before, but the crust has turned out to be very hard.... How do I get the crust to be softer?

And does anybody have any idea what kind of bread McCormick & Schmick's in Chicago bake???

Thank you!

The idea of honest bread and its making found its way into my thinking over the weekend. I find myself slipping more and more into this way of baking. Using less but wanting more from it. I didn’t bake any differently to past weekends yet I felt more connected and relaxed throughout the process. The slightly cooler temperatures certainly helped both my peace of mind and the resulting bread. The kitchen felt less frantic.

Hi,

As many others these days I mainly baked my tried and tested formulas, with not much new to blog about.

With exception of my proof box - the parts were on top of a cupboard since last summer, but now I am putting them to good use.

I think the quality of my ryes have greatly improved since.

The parts for the proof box

1. cheap picnic cooler

2. reptile thermostat

3. reptile heat mat

4. cooling rack

Here a photo:

San Francisco-style Sourdough Bread with and without Walnuts

This weekend, I continued trying variations of my San Francisco-style Sourdough Bread. Those who have followed this little adventure will note changes in my starter fermentation, the length of the autolyse and the use of this dough for a Sourdough Walnut Bread.

This is my version of Carol Fields lovely currant buns from her book 'Italy in Small Bites'.

The buns are especially delicious because of the way the lemon zest is infused into the milk, lots of zest and I used my homemade candied lemon peel and fresh unsoaked currants. 

In place of some sugar I used honey and also refrigerated the  shaped buns for an overnight ferment for fresh baked warm morning buns.  

Hello,

This time I decided to try out 100% whole wheat rolls, and added more butter + honey + milk than my previous white rolls.  The home-milled whole-wheat is pretty thirsty, so I increased hydration.  I estimated this around 78% hydration.  The dough was a little bit sticky, but easily manageable.   Overall, I am happy with the outcome, these are quite tasty w.w. sweet rolls.   :-)

Yields about 1200 grams of dough.

Milk poolish:

222g ww flour

308g milk

0.4g instant yeast

Final:

All Poolish

Thanks to Weekend Bakery's extremely helpful Croissant Making Log, I finally made a batch of croissants that I'm happy with (see link for formula and tips).

Seigle d’Auvergne

Sourdough Bread made with Liquid Levain fed twice a day

from the SFBI Artisan II Workshop

Probably the key experience provided in the SFBI Artisan II workshop on sourdough baking was baking a series of breads with liquid versus firm starters, starters fed either once or twice a day and breads with different proportions of starter. Each variation produced breads with noticeably different flavor profiles.