Blog posts

Today I felt like baking a Rührkuchen (sort of like a pond cake but less butter and less sugar, never enjoyed these super-sweet bakeries that we have here in the US).

Turns out we have no butter in the fridge---oil will do in a pinch! No Milk? Water will do, no electric mixer? 30 min of whisking is not too bad, it's a good exercise.

Wife does not like powdered sugar or sugar glazing? We'll eat the cake alfresco so to speak with a hand-brewed cup of coffee.

It may not be a cake according in compliance with the recipe, but it tastes good, looks ok, I am happy.

With a corned beef; making, soaking and smoking going on for the big day, we don’t have a lot of time to mess around with this week’s sprouted sourdough.  Lucy wanted to do Ballymaloe’s SD brown bread  which would have been perfect and we really like it, but that takes more time than I wanted to spend rounding up all the stuff that goes into it.  Plus, what we need in the freezer is a white bread.

 I saw this recipe at Christmas but decided to make it today to take with to a gathering of friends.

mix together

300 g flour

40 g sugar

1/2 tspn salt

4 gm instant yeast

add 150 ml warm milk. and knead by hand. It was so dry I added probably 10 ml more milk and 10 ml water. then I tried to incorporate 40 gm butter but gave up and used my kenwood until I had windowpane. left to double about an hour and a half. rolled out into oblong, spread 100 g apricot jam over and the following mix leaving border around all edges

The lead picture is NOT Tartine, more on that later.  

Last week's run of the Tartine Baguette formula was a success, but as noted, they were a little thin on flavor profile.  This week I reran the formula with a few changes - why not?  Substituted out 30% of the AP flour, replacing it with rye flour.  And added a foursome of the new loves (loaves?) of my life - these little "batard-ettes".  What a happy family snapshot for the future heirloom photo album.  

I usually sprinkle potenta in the bottom of the pot when I'm baking in a dutch oven, but the other day I was out. What about Kosher salt, I wondered: similar size and shape. I was also tempted by a concern my dough was a bit under salted, as I discovered after the final mix.

Result was excellent. Bread didn't stick and the bottom of the loaf had a nice salty crunch. Will do this again and you should try it too!

Been working steadily on my whole grain bread. 70% of the flour is 100% extraction wheat and rye. 30% is KA white flour. This is the best tasting loaf yet. it is moist and soft and surprisingly light.

  This is a pretty simple bake with mostly fresh milled and sifted flour with some Greek Yogurt added for some extra moisture and softness and a little lemon infused honey to round it out.  I just bought a new #40 mesh sifter so I was able to get a pretty smooth durum flour close to what I used to buy at KAF.

This one turned out very tasty, unless you don't like smoked sesame seeds or garlic sesame seeds which I added to the top of the loaves.  The crumb was soft and moderately open, perfect for grilled bread, sandwiches and just some toast with butter or cheese.

For about the last year I have been working to understand exactly what is going on when a properly proofed and slashed loaf is baked with steam. What is the role of the steam?  What is the role of the yeast?  How does hydration and proofing impact the results?  Deep slash or shallow slash? What are the differences between large and small loaves? ...

After a number of false starts, I have produced a short video showing what is going on. It is annotated but not narrated. I offer it for critique.  What is missing?  And what questions are not addressed?

My parents bought me a Komo mill for my 50th birthday.  These Hamelman WW multigrain loaves used 50% freshly milled whole grains on the finest setting, and included an overnight soaker of cracked wheat/cornmeal/sesame seeds.  

The crumb is as soft as sandwich bread, which is a total surprise.  All other factors were my normal routine, including adding a considerable amount of water during to mix to achieve medium looseness, 4 folds over about 3 hours (more than Hamelman calls for) and a 30 hour cold retard.

I've made substantial progress on my goal of baking and documenting 50 loaves this year, but I'm way behind on actually posting the results. This loaf was baked way back on January 26th, and I'm only getting around to posting it now. I have quite a backlog, actually -- apologies to anyone who might have been following along.