Blog posts

This bread is the result of not having a good idea of what I was looking to achieve this week and a bunch of diversions and distractions. When gathering things to sprout and an interruption I ended up with three grains without the gluten proteins (rice, barley and millet) and some great northern beans don't know what or if I was thinking at the time.

Hello and happy easter to all!

Thanks to every one who commented last week on how to make my scoring better, this weeks bake has a much smoother look to it, which is what I wanted.

And the crumb shot...

Hot Cross Buns from Hamelman's Bread - simple and simply delicious.

Our favourite

Juergen

My boyfriend and I love dense, chewy cookies. I know that there are various ways to go about creating a dense, flavorful cookie, but I wanted a cookie with ultimate moisture, texture, and flavor.

Well, I did pose the question the other day about converting a Polish babka to sourdough (http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/45314/converting-babka-recipe-sourdough)

Anyways, I took the plunge, tweaked the original yeasted recipe (upping the salt from a pinch to 2%) and here goes...

Ingredients:

Levain:

30g 100% hydration wholegrain rye starter

50g strong white bread flour

125ml whole milk

Dough:

All of the levain

This is the first try at hot cross buns. Followed the recipe at KAF website except for two things substituted about 25% WWW for the AP and ended up adding more flour because the dough was too sticky to form rolls with. For the  dried fruit a combo of raisins, cherries, blueberries, pineapple and our own apples were plumped in white wine.

I think they turned out pretty well for a first attempt but next will try using, at least partially, starter instead of commercial yeast and a different sweetener.

Happy Easter Everyone

Stu

Semolina Capriccioso

DMSnyder

March 25, 2016

This bread combines many streams of inspiration – my own Pugliese Capriccioso and San Joaquin Sourdough, Hamelman's Semolina Bread and Tom Cat's Semolina Filone, as described by Maggie Glezer in “Artisan Baking.”

The garden had volunteer daisies and Red Romaine lettuce growing side by side.

Lucy has been busy working on here new billion-dollar invention of bio-nanobots that you put into the flour after milling that would go to work as soon as you added water to mix for an autolyze and then tell you when to add the salt and leaven.  That sounded pretty good since I have forgotten to the salt before but she wasn’t done. 

  I've made a similar bread before and loved the way the dates add a natural sweetness to the bread.  This time I decided to add some more natural sweetness with some caramelized onions.

I made one large miche style loaf but you can easily make 2 loaves out of this formula.

The final bread as before came out great with a moderately open crumb and a nice dark chewy crust.  The dates really add such a unique pleasant flavor to the overall bread and that combined with the sweetness of the caramelized onions really make this a bread worth trying.