Blog posts

A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a coworker that I was interested in acquiring spent grains from local breweries. I'd read a few different sources on baking with spent grains, and a few were sort of intimidating (my apartment is tiny, so I don't know where I'd lay them out to dry!), but some just described dumping them in with the dough. Appealing to my experimental spirit.

A few days later, she appeared in my doorway with a plastic bag full of wet spent grains from Big Boss Brewing Company right here in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

I made these for my son's kindergarden based on Hamelman's oatmeal bread recipe

I calculated the weights in the formula based on 1kg bread flour
and ended up with 60 rolls of 46 grams each :)

The kids don't like any grains and "dirt" on their bread, so I gave up oatmeal decoration and
just brushed them with butter after the bake

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Hi, dear TFL’ers

 Wow, has it been a while! Just a quick update of what I’ve been up to during the last two months:

1 – I attended January’s Arts and crafts market. It was fun , but I only sold around 80 percent of my bread (18 total loaves).

Walnut Cranberry Sourdough. This was my first attempt at sourdough.

I used this recipe - http://www.theperfectloaf.com/walnut-cranberry-sourdough/

Looks like a few of us making this one this week! I made one last week but gave it away, I get to eat this one! Tasty flour blend.

I took a hard break from my standard baguette life to help my sister in law get her nascent bread skills some training wheels while she was visiting from far away.   I decided to do boule shaping with her, less challenging than the whole baguette pre-shape/shape/score shebang, and selected a bread I’ve never done before, in basically a shape I don’t do.  So it was discovery for both of us, but in different ways.

Hello everyone,
A dear friend sent me a link to a Rosemary Rye Brownie recipe, on the PBS Food Blog, Kitchen Vignettes, written by Aube Giroux. (nice video to accompany the recipe)

This is my first blog post on The Fresh Loaf.  Hopefully this bread will interest some of you.

I call this bread Diablo Bread, The Bread of the Devil.  The Sriracha hot sauce in the recipe is amped up by copious amounts of crushed red pepper flakes.  The orange-red color of the baked result is a warning that this is not a bread to be messed with.

If you haven't subscribed to Jarkko Laine's Bread Magazine, do it! It's an amazing publication! (http://bread.insanelyinterested.com/)

Now for the transparency disclaimer: Dabrownman and I collaborated on this article for the winter 2014 issue. It was his formulas and photos that really made the article. Check it out here: http://www.goodfoodworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Kamut-in-Bread-Magazine.pdf

If you haven't tried Dabrownman's No Fuss, No Muss Starter - look it up right now. Amazingly simple and more energy and "oomph" than any levain I've tried so far... in my very short baking career...

This formula included a little bit of freshly ground purple barley and the crumb took on a slightly lavender tint from the grain. Love the way the levain perks up with the "little hard bits!"

Happy baking!!

Here's the crumb: