Blogs

I try to post some pictures and still have problem to do it right. I did posted my pictures on Flick.

siuflower

My first attempt at the baguette monge recipe posted by Jane...thank you Jane....I did add a little more water.  I should have proofed them a little longer I think.  My slashing needs improvement.  I slashed one with the little red tomato knife and the others with my razor...I went really fast with the razor on the last one and it does make it so glide so much easier.  Next time I would like to make them a little fatter and shorter.

Sylvia

Hello dear friends,

It is my first time to try bagels, the result was not bad, actually I can not judge because I have never taste it, I'll send you some to tell me how much did my recipe succeed.

Another question please , should bagels be a little bit chewy ,or I did knead too much my dough,,I am confused,anyway, it is not bad to try new recipes.

Thank you all and have a very nice day!!!

First, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Floyd for making this post with images possible on the new TFL system.  It keeps getting better and better.  Thank you!

The following are photos of Mark Sinclair's Portuguese Sweet Bread and Rolls that I made recently.  I divided the dough in half and made 2 loaves of bread and a dozen or so rolls.  Both the bread and rolls are excellent and favorites at our house.  The bread is very good either plain or toasted and the rolls are wonderful as breakfast rolls or as sandwiches. 

Thank you Mark for this great recipe and for your video on roll shaping, which showed me the proper way  to shape rolls.  Hope you're knocking their socks off with your baked goods at your new bakery in Kalispell, Montana.

Howard

Despite all the server brou-ha-ha, I've still managed to bake a few times.

A standard Pain Sur Poolish loaf, still more-or-less using this recipe.  Served with a pot of minestrone soup.  My goal is to make one pot of soup a week all winter long and try as many new soup recipes as I can.  Where there's soup, there's bread!

This was a 20% Whole Wheat Sourdough I made last night. The batch had 200 grams of moist activated sourdough starter to 1000 grams flour (800 bread flour, 200 whole wheat flour) and around 630 grams water and 20 grams salt. I did an overnight bulk fermentation in our "cold room" (a room that gets down to around 40 degrees on winter nights), then shaped and baked it the next evening.  It has a real nice sour flavor and smell.

Here are some of my recent bakes: First off is Pane di Como from Daniel Leader's "Local Breads". This is basically a simple white loaf leavened with a biga. It's pretty wet and tricky to work with, and came across as a wicked hybrid of a plain country bread and a ciabatta dough. It's really wet according to my bread standards (73%), but I think it turned out alright. It turned into a flat, wet disc during the final proof, but the oven spring was nothing short of impressive. An interesting bread to bake, but I think I prefer Hamelman's country bread to this one.

Leader's Pane di Como

Next is another batch of Suas' NY rye. Thanks again for posting the recipe, Howard; as you said, this is a keeper. Great taste, awesome caraway scent, and a joy to bake.

Suas' NY style rye

The caraway rye is a brilliant companion to gravlaks!

Suas' NY style rye and gravlaks

Lastly, here's my version of Eric and Mark's kalamata olive and cheese loaf. I made this with a pâte fermentée, and added feta cheese to the dough. There's roughly 10% rye flour in the dough.

Kalamata olive and feta cheese loaves

The loaves were really tasty, but I'll cut back a little bit on the salt next time. I only added 1.5% salt to the overall dough recipe, but the olives were pretty salty as well. Great tasting bread, nevertheless. Thanks for the recipe Eric and Mark :-)

Kalamata olive and feta cheese loaf with pasta

I am looking for a formula for Bauerruch. I found a great photo of one in Jerome Assire's The Bread Book, but have not been able to find a specific formula anywhere. I am also wondering if anyone has ever made a sweet fougasse?
Ryan

The server upgrade this week went very well.  There have been a few little hiccups, but overall it went well, and the site is blisteringly fast now.

There are still a few missing features.  Most noticable, the gallery is gone.  The gallery solution I was using isn't mature enough to run in this version of Drupal.  I'll either reenable that gallery software when it gets stable or find a new gallery.

There also were a few other things I was hoping to add that I did not.  One thing has has been mentioned is a private messaging system, so that site users could send each other their email addresses and discussing things privately.  Again, the PM module isn't mature enough right now, but I will try to add that in soon.  Now that we are on Drupal 6, we have a lot more new modules available to us.

One module that is mature is the book module, so I think we'll try to kick off a "Baker's Handbook" project very soon, like by the start of December.  It has been... a year since we first talked about doing that?  Maybe more?  Anyway, it is definitely time.  Worst case, it doesn't work out.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

While I was waiting for the quilt store to open this morning I wandered into the local thrift store and found yet another baking book: "The Neighborhood Bakeshop" by Jill Van Cleeve. It has "recipes and reminiscences of America's favorite bakery treats" and has a little write-up of each bakery along with the featured recipe. Looks like a good read even if I don't bake from it, A.