Blog posts

Certainly understanding why folks get obsessed with the chase for baguette perfection. I think the last round were better shaped, these had better positioning of slashes (more parallel with the loaf than before), but I need to work on consistent depth of cuts. 

Taste was better as this was an overnight dough, and I'm quite happy with the crumb. Hoping to try a levain batch soon, but my starter seems to be losing vigor :( Might have to try the pineapple juice if I need to start again.

    This was supposed to be a Sprouted Durum loaf but I have not had time to do any sprouting lately.  I pulled out my mill and in went the durum berries and out came fresh Durum flour.  My mill does have its limitation so I have not been doing any sifting therefore the flour in this case was not as fine as store bought.

I decided to add some barley flour to try and get a little more nutty flavor and some egg yolks and butter to soften the crumb a bit.

 I have not had much time to post lately since I returned to work full time a two months ago, so this one is from a couple of weeks ago.

I wanted to make a hearty loaf and I decided to use some of the Angry Orchard Hard Cider I had on hand.  Normally I would create a soaker with the grains but this particular mix from KAF is fine to just add to the main dough ingredients as is.  The Harvest Grain mix contains whole oat berries, millet, rye flakes, sesame seeds, and sunflower seeds.

A friend had never used the dough hook on his kitchenaid and wanted to try making bread. So the night before we made a poolish for him, and we spent the day creating two simple loaves.

This is supposed to be vollkornbrot and yes, i'm supposed to wait at least 24 hours before i can eat it. But really it looks inedible...literally, heavy as a brick.

the recipe called for only 6g of SD in the perferment which is only to sit for 1.5 hours. After that all igredients are mixed, patted into a loaf pan and proofed for 2 hours. I followed the recipe. But it lookes as though it's gone haywire?

total rye flour was 560g with 480g water. Any idea what went wrong?

The idea here was of course to add the flavor of carmelized onion, but I wanted it in a decorative swirl in the bread. This was my basic levain. Inset on the picture shows the result. Just what I wanted.

Hello everyone,

As most of you know, Chinese New Year is February 19 this year and to celebrate the Year of the Goat, I baked one at my bakery I work part-time at. The quality is a little shoddy on my cellphone camera but I'm still really proud of it considering it's my 3rd decorated bread I've done at work!

Originally, the head baker was going to shape the bread, but he forgot about the spare dough until just before his shift ended. So he entrusted the dough with me and this is what I did:

After making some Mexican influenced bialy’s last year and rightly catching heck from the onion and poppy seed bialy purists that the Mexican creation really can’t be called bialy’s, joyfulbaker came up with a new name for them – bialotta’s since they carry on Lucy’s penchant for mega topping and add ins.  Lucy added the Da in front and now they are called DaBialotta’s.  The original Dabialotta’s can be found here: Herbed Bialy's – Multigrain, Caramelized Oni

As it turns out, the only bread style that could tear me away from my preoccupation with the intricacies of batard shaping and scoring is a style that shines brightest with the least possible handling. The process of guiding the ciabatta from bulk container to baking stone is uniquely challenging and satisfying.