Blog posts

Testing for a little personal satisfaction!  Today I baked a single large loaf of my usual - 100% levain Country Boule...I use my variation of a recipe from Northwest Sourdough,  for a 100% hydration starter, sourdough country bread.  It was proofed in the frig from 4pm until 9am.  I don't usually proof this long, but I was out for most that evening and had to leave the house at 4pm. 

Candied Fruit is often used in desserts in Italy. Candied fruit biscotti is a colorful addition to a Christmas biscotti tray.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/holiday-candied-fruit-biscotti/

Hi all,

I am contacting you from across the pond in the UK and looking for some tasty breadstick recipes that really do hit the button.  I have made two types so far. Sundried tomato, parmesan and herbes de provence and the same again but with black olives.  They are always very popular so am looking to expand on the range.  I use a white dough mix, but i am open to anything.

thanks and look forward to hearing from you

Today, we baked the three breads that we had shaped yesterday and retarded overnight – olive bread, raisin-walnut bread and miche. We also mixed and baked francese, French “country shapes” and baguette made with both pâte fermentée and liquid levain.

Olive breads loaded and scored

My advisers pronounced these perfect, at least in terms of duplicating their memory. Twice as much lard and twice as many cracklings (also of a larger size.) A much coarser crack to the pepper. Just for the fun of it, I mixed this dough considerably wetter than the last. I believe I overproofed it some. Both baked covered in cast iron. One twisted, one scored. I don't think it is necessary to score this loaf, although it is attractive.

For people who love bread and love pork, this bread is a touchstone. Make extra; it disappears very fast.

I have done 2 stollen recipes (yilding 3 big, 1 bigger-than-huge loaves), coffeebreads, cookies, now Kugelhopf. Still have a big one to come: pure sourdough pannetone, yup, after last year's sourdough pandora, I am crazy enough to take on another around of sweet starter insanity. The test run went great (with wacky timing though, I was up and baking bread at 4am), will do the real batch this weekend and report back.

Today, we mixed and baked ciabattas and challah, neither of them sourdough. We mixed and shaped olive bread, walnut raisin bread and miche to be retarded tonight and baked tomorrow. We also scaled ingredients and mixed pre-ferments for baguettes to make tomorrow. The baguettes will be made with two pre-ferments – a pâte fermentée and a liquid levain. The doughs for the ciabatta and for the miche were hand mixes, and all the levains were mixed by hand.

Scaling water for the miche mix

We have a persimmon tree and this year I thought I would make Persimmon bread from the fruit.  First I had to find a recipe that I liked and do a trial run to see how the bread tastes.  I found a recipe at this website that I used to make my bread.  http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/11/persimmon-bread.html The first one turned out very tasty but I thought that I should double the recipe and bake the bread in my panettone mold.

Well, I finally got to use my new Lodge Combi Cooker... and compared it head to head with my cloches (and tested my steaming too!). I made three breads - Tartine  (my way - with more levain since mine is so mild), my normal sourdough boule, and my take on Eric Kayser's Pain aux Cereales. The three breads are shown in the photograph below in the clockwise order listed from the upper left.