Blog posts

For the second proof, i cover my bannetons with clear shower caps from the motel. They don't last very and my stash is gone.  Think how happy I was to find this new product (at least I've never seen it before).  It has 10 covers. They are medium, large and x-large and they will cover round or oblong. THey seem to be pretty good quality.  Doing the happy dance :)  I'm sure people in King Souper's though I was crazy.   Pam

Much excitement.  Kind of a busy weekend.  But late last night after getting home from a friend's birthday party, I mixed the levain for baguettes.  Today I tried to do a bit more baking than I should have.  I wanted to make Lahmajouns for lunch while the baguette dough fermented.  So I mixed the baguette dough first thing, with my first cof of cuppee.  It's a wonder I didn't put sugar and milk in the mixing bowl (I'm not much good first thing in the morning especially after a late night).

Staying home and looking after my wife and new baby has given me all kinds of time to bake, which includes my weekly batch of baguettes.  This week was intended to be the same as last week but without the errors imposed by my wife going into labor, but let me take this opportunity to reiterate my formula and process:

Poolish

• 5.3 oz. bread flour
• 5.3 oz. water
• 1/16 tsp yeast

Final Dough

I have never made this before. I looked up a number of different recipes and then made up my own. I used my old standby of a buttermilk crust. I doubled the crust recipe .  I sauteed 7 sliced Gala apples till tender and added cinnamon and sugar and flour and a pinch of salt. I rolled out the crust and piled on the apples and baked till golden and juicy. I was wonderful with vanilla Blue Bell ice cream. We have it here in the South I don't think everyone can get it ...it is still sold in real half gallons. 

 Single Crust recipe:

I have buying Reynolds parchment paper and recently saw

http://www.webstaurantstore.com/sub434/products/parchment-paper-pan-liners.html

The pricing between Walmart and the above link is so different I am wondering if I am missing something.

The S&H for webstaurantstore was high so does anyone have suggestions?

TIA, al

One downside to working as a baker is that it doesn't allow me time to bake during the week.  So now everything gets crammed into weekends.  And frankly, sometimes after a week at the bakery, I really don't feel like spending a day off baking more.  And yet, inevitably I find my two starters staring at me ruefully, and so on a beautiful Fall day when the temperatures felt more like September than mid-November, I decided to do a series of bakes.

I am rather new at making homemade bread but it is something I am growing to love.  I come from a family of cooks and bakers, mostly from my mom's side of the family.  Her father was an excellent cook and baker; I recently stumbled upon one of his bread recipes for buttermilk loaf bread.  I have been making this loaf on the weekends for the past year or so.  However, he kept the majority of his recipes in his head and didn't write many of them down.  This has forced me to branch out on my own.

Hello, I have a group of people at work I wanted to bake bread for. I wanted to make them something special - this bread seemed to fit the bill!
It was such a pretty bread, as pictured in Advanced Bread and Pastry. With thanks to Mr. Michel Suas for a wonderful, if involved, formula - there are four separate preferments and I had to create a spreadsheet in order to figure out how to scale enough ingredients for 2000g of dough.
I divided into roughly 250g pieces to create as many loaves as I wanted to give (with one extra to keep, for tasting!). 

Tre mesi dal mio ultimo post, ma continuo a panificare. Oggi scrivo per aggiornarvi sull'andamento dei lavori per il nuovo forno a legna di Cascina Favaglie. Il forno è a buon punto, resta da terminare la canna fumaria, il tetto e la struttura frontale.

Three months since my last post, but I'm still baking bread. Today I write to update you about the construction of the new wood fire oven at Cascina Favaglie. The oven it's almost ok, we need to finish the flue, the roof and front structure.

I had to get this out of my system. I am an admirer of the bakery and the bread and I was glad to be able to take a shot at it. I agree with a lot of what's been said on both sides of the conversation about the book. I'm sure I will read and enjoy it more than I will use it to bake from. For a bakery book of that latter sort, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I still prefer Nancy Silverton. Anyway, I add my pictures for the record. I liked the pictures in the book of the loaves torn open, so I include one of those.