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Ramona's first loaves- basic white bread

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This is Ramona proudly showing her first ever loaves. Nobody in her family has ever made bread this way. Mexico is not a country where loaves would have been easily accesible some years ago. The corn tortilla reigns. This is now changing with more people having access to stoves, and wheat.

Ramona has now cooked bread at her mothers home in Macuspana. She is eager to learn and cant wait to experiment with the loaves .

"Times" bread in southern mexico..stage one

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In preperation  of the "times loaf experiment tomorrow,
we went to "el centro" (downtown) to a store known for its selection of enamel pots. I bought a wonderful 4 qt. baby blue one with lid and a handle for the equivalent of $7 US.  There were larger ones that may have been 20qt pots for 17 US dollars.

Multigrain

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I made a multigrain bread a weekend or two ago:

Multigrain bread

I made a porridge of grains the night before. Oats, millet, quinoa, polenta, and anything else I could find.

multigrain bread

I added all of that to a simple dough. Slightly sweetened with honey, softened with some milk and oil

Wretched sourdough in the tropics...

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I used the starter than I have been carefully feeding since last thursday night. All indications were right, smell, bubbles etc..and baked somethng that looked great, and felt like a doorstop. It was a VERY dense loaf, not what I would choose to have again. So I fed the starter and popped it into the fridge...perhaps I will try again next week.

Sourdough in the tropcis??

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Well the sourdough is now into the fridge for the next phase of folding every hour for the next four or five hours. I will then leave it overnight on the lower shelf inthe fridge.

It seems like a surprisingly small loaf given all of the work on the starter..which began last Thursday. I have put the remainder into the fridge after feeding and will use it again next week, should this loaf work....if not, I am going back to tried and true recipes...and the trusty cottage loaf from the weekend.

Sourdough starter in southern mexico

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I started this starter on thursday evening, and this morning I noticed a subtle change in the smell, for the better. The harsh sour smell had gone .

I poured off all the top forming houch and have been feeding it faithfully every 8 hours. Today I think I finally have enough bubbles to make the dough tomorrow and bake the bread on wednesday morning.

Ramona also tried making two loaves at her families home over the weekend. Only one of the two loaves rose and one of her children touched a loaf on its final rise and probably punctured the surface.