Blog posts

I just finished reading "In Search of the Perfect Loaf" by Samuel Fromartz. As a "bread geek", I enjoyed the book very much. In one chapter he writes about his rye journey in Berlin. That chapter along with all the rye bread photos I am seeing posted by Stan's testers made me crave some rye bread. I missed the opportunity to become a recipe tester since Stan's reply to me ended up in my spam folder and I didn't see it until it was too late. I guess it was flagged as spam because it was a bulk email to all who signed up. Oh well.

Had some pressure on this bake. This loaf was requested by my teenage girl for her high school leadership meeting. She likes this particular formula that uses equal parts of my wheat and rye starters.

It usually ends up being a nice big loaf with lots of flavor and it looks like this won't disappoint. It sang to me for the longest time after pulling it out of the oven. Wish I could go see the crumb, but that isn't going to get to happen. 

Decided it was time for my first foray into the world of sprouting grains.  Rather than jump straight into a bake from PR's latest book I decided to conduct an experiment to firstly see if I could actually sprout some grains and secondly to bake some test loaves with different quantities of sprouted flour.  Here's how it went.

The Sprouting

Took a bunch of organic spelt grains, rinsed them thoroughly 2-3 times and then put them in a pot and covered with water.

This is my third attempt of the Pain Au Levain formula from Peter Reinhart's new book "Bread Revolution".

The first 2 did not come out correctly.  I now suspect the main culprit was that I did not dry out the sprouted winter wheat berries enough and the flour was too moist.  This time I let it dry out using a fan for a day and half and the bread came out much better.

Cari amici,

quest'anno nell'attesa di iniziare a produrre i regali e le dolcezze da donare, per le festività ormai prossime, mi sono regalata un nuovo Corso di Pasticceria che prevedeva alcuni prodotti tipicamente Natalizi qui in Italia.

Io ne sono rimasta entusiasta ......se la cosa vi incuriosisce e può esservi di spunto per le vostre produzioni, date un'occhiata qui sotto e fatemi sapere cosa ne pensate:

Thank you Hanseata for the croissant recipe & instructions - they turned out wonderfully even in Hawaii's 80 degree weather!

Hi! I just got a copy of "Tartine" (it might be a little outdated, but what the hell). Anyway, this is the first attempt at the basic country loaf recipe. I think the crimb should be more open, at least according to the pictures, but I still liked it very much.

Baked my seeded SD loaf again this weekend. Decreased hydration, still slow activity during bulk fermentation. But got a bit more oven spring than last week.

taste is fantastic as previously using BF, WW heritage and rye. 3 seeds sesame, poppy n sunflower.

After two years of trying (and failing) to make various sourdough starters I have finally succeeded!  I used Maggie Glezer's firm sourdough starter (from zolablue's post).  I started in September and it was a little slow, then a family member got very sick so I just put it in the refrigerator for probably 5 weeks before getting it going about 10 days ago.  I managed to get it to double, then treble in size in 24 hours but remained frustrated that I couldn't do it in 8 hours.

Quite airy and evenly sized pockets dotted with added sunflwr sesame and walnuts..