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It's been a bit since I've baked. Bread has been bought at our house lately, which I'm not that happy with, and therefore I figured I should get in gear again. I wanted a bread that was relatively low fuss, so I decided on a reduced amount of yeast in a normal, slightly wetter dough.

I started with 2 cups of flour, 1/4 teaspoon of yeast, and 1 cup water. Those were mixed and left in my oven for 5 hours. By this time the mass had tripled and was looking quite good. I mixed in 1/2 cup more water and 1.5 teaspoons salt, then flour 1/2 a cup at a time until I came to the right consistency for me...ended up being about 3.75 cups. It was a rather wet, sticky mass. I kneaded it in the bowl until it formed itself into something vaguely resembling a ball and stashed it in my refrigerator until morning. Woke up, took it out, let it come to room temperature. Once there, I shaped the dough into as nice a ball as I could manage and placed it into a bowl bottom up. I let that double. Baked at 425 for 20 minutes covered, and then 10 minutes uncovered, until the middle reached 200 degrees. I think it needed a little longer in the oven, but it turned out pretty well.

I think the next time I make this I'll not do a preferment at all. I really don't think it changed anything. I'll just mix up the ingredients, knead for a little while, and then stash in the fridge for a long fermentation. It'll probably turn this into 36 hour bread, but that's quite fine with me if the results are this tasty.

Pizza Margarita: Lot's of big bubbles under the sauce.SylviaPizza: Hey who say's a pizza has to be round!!  I used P.R. recipe for Neo-Neopolitan Pizza from his book "American Pie" and my own sauce recipe using my favorite canned crushed tomatoes for the base...Henry's Market's own brand.  Since I had one frozen crust and sauce left I cooked this pizza indoors....my wood-fired oven makes fantastic pizza...but the ones indoors can be really fantastic tasting.  I'm not sure how to post all picture in on the same page...so I apologize.  I'am just finding out how to post images in my Blog... Sylvia

I have a confession to make: I've never eaten bagels before. Somehow these dense, naughty creatures have escaped me. Well, until now, that is. I'm not sure what triggered my curiosity; it's probably a toss-up between the exotically low hydration levels in the bagel dough, and the recent US presidential election. Anyways. I leafed through Hamelman's Bread, and found a bagel recipe that looked bulletproof. This is a dough with 58% hydration (I did have a hard time getting the dough together in one piece at first), that I let ferment in the fridge overnight, shaped in the morning, and then proof in the fridge while I was at work today. When I got home this afternoon, I put some malted barley syrup into a huge kettle of boiling water, and let these chewy monsters soak for about a minute (boy did they puff up...), before they were left to cool in ice water for a few more minutes. Onto a plate of sesame seeds and then onto a scorching hot baking stone.

As I said, I've never had these before, so I don't know how close I got to the genuine NY style bagel, but let me tell you that Hamelman's recipe is pure genius. To me, these were awesome. They had that famous chewy exterior, and really pleasant hints of malted barley (both in the dough itself and from the syrup in the boiling water). Sorry, no cream cheese, but they were covered with French brie, some vegetables, and a couple of Pick salami slices. A little piece of bagel heaven right there :-)

Hamelman's bagels

Hamelman's bagels

The multigrain bread dough I made yesterday was turning out wonderfully. It was just the right consistency. It had risen to just the right level when it was time to shape it. I decided to make it into two loaves and four buns shaped like tabatières.

Tabatières?? I didn't know what those were either before reading Steve's (Bread cetera) post about making diadèmes (tiaras) by pushing tabatières (tobacco pouches) into a circular shape. Steve made videos, one of which clearly shows how to shape tabatières. Do take a look. In fact, take a look at his whole site! He makes the most wonderful bread!

The buns were delicious for breakfast!

To find out what happened with the loaves, read here.

Here is the recipe I used:

• multigrain bread (This time, I added 2 Tbsp buckwheat flour and omitted the sunflower seeds.)

I did it. I just went and ordered a better server for TFL. It'll be a major step up in every way: twice the RAM, 5 or 6 times the CPU, faster hard drives. It should considerably reduce the double posts and number of times when TFL feels slow.

As well as the move to the new machine, it'll also be an upgrade of OS, database, web server, and content management system. I hope all of these changes will result in improvements for the user experience here, but inevitably there will be some hiccups, new tricks to learn, and new bugs to fix. And so a new adventure begins...

If the new server comes online today I'm hoping to be ready to cut the site over to the new machine Tuesday or Wednesday.

Stay tuned.

  Double knotted rolls - shaped 

  
Rolls proofed 

  
Double knotted rolls - Baked  

Norm's formula for these rolls is here: 
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/9536/double-knot-roll#comment-49092 

David 

I was wondeering if anyone has a good sweet fougasse recipe they would like to share. Hope you can help.

chefryan

I didn't get a picture of the sticky buns I made from Mark's recipe that I have had since April. Been trying to make them and these cinnamon rolls forever but haven't had time. So the past two days I have been doing nothing but baking and these rolls are great! Thank you Zolablue for sharing the recipe and Thank you Mark for sharing your recipe. They are both hits! (I omitted the salt in Zolablue's recipe due to the fact that I had salty mashed potatoes with sour cream left over to make the dough with.)

Cinnamon Rolls

Cinnamon Rolls II

Edit**- I also made 24 rolls out of this batch of dough which when weighed was around 1622 grams. Anyone else have this happen?

Hello guys , did you miss me ???

I really missed you sooo much!!!!

I bought something new???here it is!!!

baguettes moulds.

So i used it several times , the results were amazing!!!

baguettes2natiguamalika

Yassin & Malika were checking the harvest!!

Thanks to you! please Be my guest on my new blogs!!

Chahira

http://chahirakitchen.blogspot.com/

http://chahiraelkhabira.blogspot.com/

The cooler weather has set in with a vengeance and whenever it is windy, our draughty house is even colder than usual. Consequently, I was once again having difficulty getting dough and/or shaped bread to rise.

cold kitchen = SLOW rise

So I decided to add a tiny bit of commercial yeast to our wild bread recipe. The dough still took forever to rise - it was after midnight when I took the bread out of the oven. I had hoped and expected to be baking the bread just before dinner at around 19:30... but I didn't get to shape it until 19:00!!

I really should have taken a photo of the bread just before it went into the oven. It was easily half the height. Talk about oven spring!

The crumb was nicely chewy and the flavour had a slight sour tone but a lovely nutty flavour. Even though the crust was quite dark, there was not even a hint of burnt aroma or taste.

Here is the recipe I used:

• blog from OUR kitchen: semi-wild bread
  based on the recipe for basic sourdough in Piano Piano Pieno by Susan McKenna Grant

-Elizabeth