Blog posts

Everyone, have a fun trick and yummy treat!!

I am honored to be participating as a recipe tester for Stan Ginsberg's upcoming bread book featuring rye breads.  We are not legally allowed to share or discuss the actual recipes we are testing, but fortunately we can at least wet your appetite with some photos.

After 3 weeks of baking fruit, nut and seed bread, Lucy had enough of these experiments and decided to go back to another experiment that she wasn’t quite happy with  the last outcomes. This bake goes back to the multigrain SD breads using home sprouted, dried and milled flour but also using the same sprouted multi-grains as whole berries.

Some changes I made for this bake of 3-stage pain au levain

-Levain chef premiere fermented for 3 hours

-Included a 2 hour RT autolyse without levain

-bulk fermentation lasted 45 minutes

-hydration increased to 72%

-used "high extraction" flour blend: 50% whole wheat, 50% all purpose

-Shaped into 1 miche, 1 boule, and 1 batard

some crumb shots

When my son's family visited us in August he brought some "Canadian & very strong white flour" purchased in the UK can anyone please tell me anything about this flour - is it similar to what in the UK is described as "Strong white flour" and here in France TYPE 65?

A further question  Farine de Ble Noir which I think is Buckwheat flour - rye flour or not? - various websites indicate it is but don't answer the question directly!

Right now I certainly have the will to bake, and some interesting new books to bake from, but am so busy with work and travel that I'm not finding time to bake much at all right now.  Above is the one sourdough boule I made last week. It did come out pretty nice, I gotta admit.

This weekend's travel took me past Bread Farm in Bow, Washington, which is always worth a short detour to visit.

I downsized from a 1500sq ft house with a 60s style kitchen best used for 60s style TV dinners. You know, no counter space. I am now in a small apartment with even less counter space and I'm still searching for storage space.

This weekend was a "disaster" in terms of baking waste. I don't even recall what I was trying to bake, but I got distracted and used the wrong quantity of water.  I determined this because the autolyse was very dry and when I weighed my container it was short by a whole lot.  Unfortunately, it was not possible to incorporate the missing water at this point.

After a few days struggling with baking ciabattas with low-protein flowers sold here in Brazil (trying to achieve an open crumb), I took a one-day break from bread baking and tried this olive oil, orange, pound cake. It turned out pretty good.