Blog posts

Despite all the server brou-ha-ha, I've still managed to bake a few times.

A standard Pain Sur Poolish loaf, still more-or-less using this recipe.  Served with a pot of minestrone soup.  My goal is to make one pot of soup a week all winter long and try as many new soup recipes as I can.  Where there's soup, there's bread!

Here are some of my recent bakes: First off is Pane di Como from Daniel Leader's "Local Breads". This is basically a simple white loaf leavened with a biga. It's pretty wet and tricky to work with, and came across as a wicked hybrid of a plain country bread and a ciabatta dough. It's really wet according to my bread standards (73%), but I think it turned out alright. It turned into a flat, wet disc during the final proof, but the oven spring was nothing short of impressive. An interesting bread to bake, but I think I prefer Hamelman's country bread to this one.

The server upgrade this week went very well.  There have been a few little hiccups, but overall it went well, and the site is blisteringly fast now.

There are still a few missing features.  Most noticable, the gallery is gone.  The gallery solution I was using isn't mature enough to run in this version of Drupal.  I'll either reenable that gallery software when it gets stable or find a new gallery.

While I was waiting for the quilt store to open this morning I wandered into the local thrift store and found yet another baking book: "The Neighborhood Bakeshop" by Jill Van Cleeve. It has "recipes and reminiscences of America's favorite bakery treats" and has a little write-up of each bakery along with the featured recipe. Looks like a good read even if I don't bake from it, A.

I have a confession to make: I've never eaten bagels before. Somehow these dense, naughty creatures have escaped me. Well, until now, that is. I'm not sure what triggered my curiosity; it's probably a toss-up between the exotically low hydration levels in the bagel dough, and the recent US presidential election. Anyways. I leafed through Hamelman's Bread, and found a bagel recipe that looked bulletproof.