Blog posts

This past week The Back Home Bakery had guest intern Greg (gcook17) visiting from Mountain View, CA.  He brought his extensive bread and pastry skills to the workbench and got to try his hand at using the sheeter too.  Thanks a lot Greg for all of your help - we hope to see you again up here!

-Mark
http://TheBackHomeBakery.com

stretch and fold on a 10 loaf batch of Rustic White

A quick phone cam pic of my latest pain de campagne (over the kitchen sink where the light is bright).

Scoring was easier and smoother than usual this time. (Perhaps I've been over-proofing and didn't this time?)

Does that expansion of the slash look excessive? Is there such a thing as too much oven-spring?

Still hot, haven't opened it up yet.

This weekend I decided to try Hamelman's Country Bread in the shape of a boule.  However, I lack proofing baskets, and as I proceeded through the recipe, a nagging thought kept injecting itself: So, how do plan on keeping your boule from turning into a pancake?

I baked only one loaf, so I scaled down his recipe thus:

Overall formula:

Flour (sir galahad)    454g    100%

I made bagels this morning using some of the General Mills All Trumps High Gluten Flour I'd ordered from NYBakers.  They turned out well.

With cream cheese and a tomato picked fresh from the garden this morning they were delicious.

Chouette22 posted a couple of weeks ago pictures of her Zopf (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/13045/hello-switzerland-celebration-bread-and-zopf). In a reply to my post she mentioned that eggs in this bread would make it dryer or stale faster. This motivated me to experiment with my recipe, with the goal to have at the end a fully understood, easy to use and "Americanized" recipe.

I was in Portland nearly three years ago to attend the birth of my second grandson (first child for my son).  I had not been baking very long and I knew that Portland was a 'Bread' town.  My son took me to the Pearl where I purchased several breads, including a Walnut Bread.  We took the purchases back to the apartment and tried them all.  I liked the Walnut Bread, but felt that, with a little work, I could produce a loaf that tasted that good.  I'm truthfully not sure of the origin of this recipe, but I have adjusted it over the years based upon suggestions from my

I made this bread from Salome's formula a couple months ago. At that time, I couldn't get good quality hazelnuts, so I made it with walnuts only. It was very good tasting, had amazing keeping quality and was excellent after having been frozen.

Here are some photos from last night's Rosh Hashana Challah bake!