Blog posts

Hello,

It shouldn't matter much, but in case any of my old bread baker friends was wondering, a few months ago Floyd agreed to change my online name to Sam (my name), instead of 'gvz', which was a reference to the pink floyd track of the grand vizier's garden party in ummagumma.    Anyway, I wanted to be me instead of some alias.   So I am Sam.  Nice to meet you.   Maybe some day I will put my picture on here.

I purchased several sprouted products from here. I have made my granola recipe for almost 30 years. Reluctant to try anything new I broke out the bowls and pans and did it anyway !  What a treat. I will never use plain rolled oats again. This is the perfect texture crunchy and chewy both. A wonderful complex flavor and for some reason the coconut taste comes through more in every bite also. A win-win in my book .  

I finally got around to purchasing a container of food grade lye . I had tried to find info on lye baths for bagels but there is very little out there and the percent of lye to water that was used seemed way off. I am glad that I pursued this and have some data that I hope will help others. I purchased the lye on Amazon  here . Will likely last me a good long while. I used 5 grams in 1 gallon of filtered tap water. This is approx. 12-12.5 % alkalinity.

We have been trying out various versions of buns for hot dogs and hamburgers.   This time we went back to basics and looked for a whole wheat bun on the King Arthur website.  We found their 100% WW one for hot dogs and their white bread one for hamburgers.

Following up on Wingnut's pizza post, here are a few shots of our pesto pizza from last night.

I used an overnight poolish for the crust, made the dough in the early AM and baked in the evening.

I thought about titling this entry "With failures like these, who needs success?" This morning, I baked another new-to-me bread from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast. It is called "75% Whole Wheat Levain Bread," and it is a 75% whole wheat sourdough bread with a little instant yeast but otherwise just - You guessed it! - Flour, water, and salt.

Yesterday was a big day for this old skibum.  I made a trip to the big city and picked up my new Kitchenaide SS fridge to go with the KA SS stove bought in the spring AND stopped the Bass Pro store and bought a Lodge combo cooker for $50, which is WAY easier to load than my 4" deep enameled CA DO, which was taking a bit of a beating doing bread and is my favourite cooking tool, both stove top and oven.  The Lodge CC rocks!

When I saw my teenage son, the one not too fond of reading, reading "the Hunger Games" books, I decided to give it a read as well. I remember the Harry Potter days, reading them to see what my daughter and her friends were all talking about. We ended up reading at least the first book together as a family.  (My daughter and I would read others together with her hiding them while she was in school so I wouldn't read ahead.)

So now there I was reading the Hunger Game series.