Blog posts

I’ve been participating the baguette CB and realized that I hadn’t documented any of the baguette bakes in my blog.  I find it can be nice to go back and see how my baking has progressed with its various ups and downs.

The formula I’ve settled on to hone my baguette craft with is Abel’s Baguette au Levain.  This is the formula I’ve been following.

For three baguettes about 280 g (to account for aliquot jar)

My Rus-ian bread journey

I just finished baking my first Oatmeal Porridge Bread out of the Tartine no. 3 cookbook.  I've only been making bread for a few months (15-20 loaves), so please keep in mind the following are the interpretations and results of a true beginner! Since I've started to have consistent success with the Tartine loaves, I thought I'd try my hand at a porridge bread for the first time.  

Not baking so much but love the combination of Kamut & spelt so this weekend did a repeat of an earlier bake where I had pushed the Kamut to 50% with close to 80% hydration.  

Starter was refreshed on Friday morning and so before bed I built the levain. 13 g starter + 60 g water + 60 g bread flour

Saturday at 9:15 am autolyse for 30 minutes

      This bread is like a Challah on steroids ?.  If you have not tried making a porridge bread yet, give this one a try and you won't be disappointed.  It is full of flavor and pretty healthy to boot.

You can vary the porridge ingredients and it will still taste great and if you want to make it a little more decadent, use heavy cream instead of the milk in the porridge and use some in place of the water in the main dough as well.

I usually would use peaches this year because the local Ontario peaches are awesome but you have to peel them. Nectarines don’t need to be peeled so that’s why they are in my galette. This is my first galette although I have baked many a pie. I used my go to pie pastry recipe by Bravetart. If you’re not familiar with it the recipe is in her awesome books  I love that it has the delicious flavour is butter and no transfats that shortening pastry would have.

Cedarmountain here on TFL got me interested in making miso after he replied to my blog post about my red miso furikake sourdough.  One major ingredient needed to make miso paste from scratch so I learned from him was koji rice.  From Tartine Book No. 3 “Koji is the traditional Japanese food culture of rice inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae mold.

 I’m revisiting a lot of my recipes so it was time to remake this one and tweak the method as well. I did not sift out the bran and I used mostly unbleached flour in the levain. To be honest, I was being lazy since I had very little wholegrain flour handy, I just used unbleached flour. I also decided not to add the usual yogurt since the dough seemed quite hydrated and there would be plenty of fat to tenderize the crust from the onions and the bacon.

Recently I posted the arrival of a new oven that I purchsed as a dedicated bread oven, and since then have been in setup mode and quickly realized this has become a project as opposed to a more plug-n-play scenario.  So with that, I am seeing some positive results and want to share them here.

Rustic/Country Baguettes with Sunflower Seeds.

Abel Sierra (Abelbreadgallery) sent a DM to me last week with a link to his new video where he makes this bread.   I asked if I could post this and he said yes.  And of course I wouldn't post it without giving it a whirl myself.  In this case, three whirls to get a version of the formula that I was satisfied with.