Blog posts

that baker's have to EAT their mistakes... I am okay with this one.  I used a chewy roll recipe.. attempting to get those big holes I envy... but "Lucille Ball" was in the kitchen!!!

  This looked promising... but the jiggliness was 

a scary factor... I knew it would either flatten or stick... welllllll..... 

It chose to stick... totally....but the real    

During the heat of my Thanksgiving rush in the bakery right now (so many rolls...so many rolls), I received word from a wonderful lady I was interviewed by back in May, named June. She works with New York State in Agriculture and specifically was interviewing about my heavy usage (roughly 90%) of local whole grains. 

Another nice Forkish style loaf, 300 g flour, 10% durham semolina, 231 g water 1 tsp coarse sea salt and 3/4 Tbs EVOO. I once again worked at tight seams during the fold of the pre-shape and shape and it looks like a pretty tight bloom on this bake. Again this loaf was risen with 25g sweet levain and 25g yeast water levain.

The other day CeciC posted some fantastic looking crackers made without any leavening at all here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35589/whey-seeds-crackers

As soon as I saw them I new Lucy and I would have to give them a go since we have wanted to make crackers for just about forever.

The last bread we are making for Thanksgiving is Mini’s Rye Bread at 100% hydration sans Chia seeds but adding a Munich Dopplebock, some soaker water, flax seed and yeast water to the mix and deleting the gargantuan pine nuts she found in Chili.  Her bake is found here:

Mini's 100% Dark Rye & Chia Recipe ...Love at 104% hydration

I tried something different with this one in that I used a starter that I fed with rye flour.  It really took off and improved the "lift" for my starter.  I had used all AP flour previously and was not getting much rise lately. It's getting colder as well, so that doesn't help.  The dough was a bit wetter than usual, and the shaping was much more difficult than I anticipated. I had to knead in a bit more flour, but finally got it to where I wanted it.

Another day, another loaf. Same concept here, use the "My Daily Bread" recipe as a basis for modification. In this case it is also a basis for education.

CONCLUSION(S): I think that I have been chronically underproofing my loaves and I think the "retarding" in the fridge is really exacerbating this problem ... so in the next loaf I'll wait longer for the final rise. I also have been very loosey-goosey with my measuring, I don't like this approach (mostly because I am not sure of the final hydration) and therefore I'll 1) formulate a recipe and 2) follow it.

Time flies: I just noticed my most recent blog post so far here on The Fresh Loaf was published almost exactly a year ago! Many times, I have thought of writing something, but the work on my magazine Bread and the requests from my kids have taken all the time. Maybe it's all about priorities, or maybe I'm just not very good at keeping too many balls in the air at once.

Anyway, today I have something to share, so I thought it's time to stop the silence and write another post.

Last week, I’ve baked my first recipe from Andrew Whitely’s  “BREAD MATTERS”: seeded rye bread. The bread was wonderfully delicious and truly addictive. However, I failed to notice that the dough weighs 650g, and cannot fill up my large terrine pan. The bread, however, was an immediate success and half of it was literally devoured while being sliced!

It took  awhile, but this is my take on Karin’s Cecilienhof Ancient Grain Rye Bread challenge.  The list of ingredients involved initially had me convinced I would stay on the sidelines for this challenge.  But I had more of them than I realized on hand already and a little searching turned up the rest (ah, the power of the internet!).  Still, I haven’t had to think this hard about a bread in a long time.             &