September 5, 2011 - 4:45pm
A German in SouthEast UK
Good evening, everybody.
I am blue (:-)) and I am a German who lives in the south east of the UK. Having started already with my first sourdough culture three years ago in Germany, I never made much progress. But as I am in urgent need for a better bread in the UK, I decided I give it another go (my 4th time already :-)).
The reason why I decided to join the fresh loaf is to find other people based in the UK to have an information exchange about all kind of bread recipes baked with English flour. As far as I am aware, there is not UK sourdough forum, so the American version seems to be the best option.
Thanks for reading.
Kind regards,
Blue
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Welcome to the site Blue. I think you will find this a friendly place to learn about sourdough or any other breads for that matter. We have many good UK based bakers who will be able to help you with flours and other ingredients. I look forward to seeing your breads.
Eric
Hello bluesaturn and Welcome to TFL!
I am based in Northumberland, and just taking up a new lecturing post in Leeds for 3 days per week. I have a blog here on TFL which I post on regularly; see here:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/blog/ananda
There are loads of good bakers from the UK on here, including Daisy_A, lumos, JuergenKrauss, RuralIdle, Salimandre sgratch, Bertie26 and a good few more. This is a very friendly site and the real strength of it is being able to communicate with bakers all over the world.
If you want more specific UK action, have you thought about joining the Real Bread Campaign? See here:
http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/
Best wishes
Andy
Welcome, Blue, our fellow UK TFler! :)
Being originally from another country myself, I know exactly what you mean. I guess you miss something like these or these or these? ;)
That's exactly what I've been trying to do, too. And I'm sure Juergen, your fellow compatriot who's currently holidaying in Wales, will be very please to have you on board, too!
best wishes,
lumos, also in South East :)
Dear all,
Thank you for your warm welcome and thank you already for your help in the other thread. Thank you for your patience with me and my many questions.
At the moment, I think bread baking is a bit confusing for me. But my intention is to solve this problem in a good way.
Ananda, in what area do you lecture? Ananda your breads look great. I am dreaming to reach this skill level.
It seems you organised a baking course. Do TFL members meet somewhere in the UK from time to time to bake together, please?
I had not heard of this Bread campaign, however in the "Great British Bake off" from last year there was an interview where one of the toast companies mentioned cheap white bread it what English want. I think that is not true, however it is understandable that not everybody can afford a loaf for 3GBP or more.
Lumos, are you from Japan? My supervisor is from Japan as well, he never mentioned "proper" bread is so popular over there. :-)
Maybe I should practise more and give him one of my creations one day as a present.
Dear all, I will look out for your threads and recipes. I thank you that you mention the names of the used flours in your recipes.
Best wishes,
Blue
Hi, again. :p
Yes, I'm from Japan, though I've been here half my life already.....which is very long. :p
Yep, German breads are quite popular there, almost as popular as French breads or Japanese breads. Unless you're in a real countryside, almost every town has a proper artisan bakery or two, with real bakery at the back of the shop with real trained-bakers baking bread from scratch on the premises. I just picked those links above very randomly on the internet and they are not 'the famous' beckarei or anything like that, so you can imagine how many good bakers are there....and there're more French style boulangeries than German style Beckarei and even more Japanese bakeries, too. And that's one of very few things I miss about Japan and the reason why I started breadmaking very seriously. I've been baking some breads since I was 10 or 11, but the obsession in recent years stareted purely out of desperation, as you would probably understand.
My supervisor is from Japan as well, he never mentioned "proper" bread is so popular over there. :-) Maybe I should practise more and give him one of my creations one day as a present.
Yeah, you can ask him about what sort of breads you can get in Japan, but it may be safer to check what sort of bread he likes before giving yours as a present. Some people only like Japanese-style bread which has softer crumb with slightly sweeter flavour, often rich with butter/egg/cream. ;)
lumos