Blog posts

I used Danielle Forestier's baguette recipe from her demo on Julia Child PBS video to make these batards.  My oven wasn't large enough to make baguettes so I opted for the batards.  She doesn't use a pre-ferment, only yeast. I didn't get the nice large holes in the interior that are characteristic of French baguettes/batards but I suspect it was because the dough should have been a little wetter and I wasn't gentle enough with the dough when rolling, pinching and shaping it, but they tasted very good.  I'll keep trying. 

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I decided to make dinner early for a change and needed to make some bread as well.

I began the bread so that it could rise while I was doing dinner. It began as my usual loaf, but I thought we needed more grains in our diet (seeing as I had been having porridge each morning for breakfast while I was getting used to the cold UK weather and then while the oven was broken and once it was fixed I have been eating bread for breakfast, lunch and snacks......tut tut tut)

After seeing some of the posts of bread bowls, I figured I would give it a whirl.  I made 4 White bread bowls, which were actually full size boules.  And made Broccoli Cheese Soup from a Panera Bread recipe I found online.

Below is a photo of my third attempt at home milling and sifting, which resulted in a flour very similar to my favorite "high extraction flour", Heartland Mills Golden Buffalo flour. The processes used on my second and third tries are explained further below. Additional photos of the process have been posted.

My home sifting project resulted in "middlings", a term I may be using incorrectly. What I mean by middlings is the stuff I sifted out that is finer than bran but was coarser and darker than I wanted for the flour being produced.

Recently, I've been attempting to grind and sift my own flour. The grinding is straightforward with a Retsel Mil-Rite, an excellent home stone buhr mill or my new Meadows 8-inch stone mill. However, the mysteries of sifting the flour have been less straightforward. A subsequent blog entry will deal with my progress on grinding and sifting my own flour. The sifting project motivates the need for measuring the ash content of my flour.

Ash Content

Well the day is finally winding down, and I think I am done. What a great day it has been.  I started off making the kids some home made pancakes from a recipe I found online some time ago.  Since they were made from scratch, my youngest calls 'em "Daddy's Scratchy Pancakes".  It stuck with the rest of the family as well, so that was their request before they went to bed last night.  After the scratchy pancakes were finished off I got to work on my breads.