Blog posts

Baguettes made with San Francisco Sourdough dough

I still find it a funny experience to bake and then display small snippets of my life. Over the past fortnight I have perhaps pondered too deeply on this and my relationship with baking and bread … driven poor Nat to distraction I am sure.

So what do I want my bread to be like?

I made the Ciabatta from Professor Reinhart’s formula in Bread Baker’s Apprentice today.   Easy to make, though I can see where a novice might want to add more flour to the gloppy dough instead of trusting to the magic of gluten.   I added a heaping teaspoon of milk powder to soften the crumb.   I shaped a pound of dough into four large rolls.

It’s a simple bread.  Nice texture and good flavor, but nothing to write home about.  I think it would be good for a sandwich roll.

First, a tip of the hat to theuneditedfoodie for his recommendation of Chris Glen's breads.  Thank you, Raj!

hi there everyone just starting off here with the bloggy action.  this is 30% whole wheat sourdough that i have been making every week for sandwiches and just to have around the house.  i will be detailing more work in the future, but part of this is figuring out the technology (of blogging about bread) which i am currently doing. 

La Micca a Lievitazione Naturale sulla tavola per cena. Solo lievito naturale in coltura liquida, farina tipo 2 (forte), acqua (78%), sale integrale.

[color=blue]The Sourdough Miche on my dinner table. Only liquid sourdough culture, high extraction wheat flour (strong), water (78%), unrefined sea salt.[/color]

Over the past three or four weeks I've been experimenting with small adjustments, one at a time, to my process. Three of them appear to be adding positive nuances to my loaves. They are:

• longer autolyse, prior to adding yeast (or levain) and salt.

• using  new steam-generating containers.

• warming retarded, pre-shaped dough, and final proofing at elevated temperature: 82°F

I'm not dead, I've just been hiding from the temptations of the current ITJB items...

Plus, I haven't done anything interesting other than my usual weekly sourdoughs that we live off of, with maybe the following exceptions:

I made a bunch of marbled, braided loaves for people that I didn't get pictures of. At the end, I had a handful of strands left over and I was tired of braiding, so I shoved them into a lidless pullman pan...

My first post!  I keep my bread notes in a cheap notebook stuck to my fridge, but thought a bread blog might work better, and enable me to share my notes.  I am fairly new to bread baking and find some of the posts here rather intimidating.  I took an artisan bread baking course at our local technical college last fall, developed a wild yeast starter during the class, and was off and running with the longer-fermentation methods.  Before the class I had been making all our bread, but  just plain whole wheat sandwich loaves from my own flour, mixed and kneaded and bak