Blogs and beginners

    I have been baking for years, blogging on here over a year and I was telling Pamela yesterday about a weekend FLOP I did. Where I let time get away from me and let my dough rise over the bowl and collapse down the freezer in an awful mess. No baker is perfect. I guarantee that if you post a picture of your loaf, with the recipe and what you did, you will get more help on here than you know what to do with! Follow the instructions and you will have bread to show off in no time. I promise. Most of us here did not come as a master baker. We came out of a need to improve and was seeking someone to help us do just that. Everyone has baked their share of bricks. I could have lived in an adobe home made of bread in the beginning! Come on , give us what you got. Your family will be glad you did ;-) !

   P.S. If you ever get disheartened again, look up a thread that had our biggest disasters on it from last year. Laugh about it, get advise, use it and be proud of your new accomplishment.

                                                                    Audra

Dave,

It just ain't so!  Go ahead, paw back through my blog; you'll find some ugly loaves.  (My first attempt at ciabatta was particulary homely.)  Lots of posters have shared everything from their first attempts (sometimes lovely, sometimes less so) to their latest challenges.  Some blogs are outright pleas or help!  There have been a thread or two about baking disasters show up here on TFL, too.

Whatever you're baking, feel free to blog about it.  You'll get lots of encouragement and help. 

Paul

I just started a new bread blogspot and it is more difficult to do than making breads! Almost just as fun. Mistakes are just hors d'oeuvres. 

I've been visiting TFL now for more than a year and am so thankful for it. I'd a never get such knowledge from just books. The internet just astounds me. The human species is really going to get smarter faster don't you think?    Anet

One does NOT need to be an expert to blog about their bread adventures. My own blog is chock full of really questionable loaves. That's why I'm blogging! It is merely the recodring of the process as I'm learning the art & science of bread making. If I only posted the perfect loaves, well, I wouldn't have anything to blog about. And it would be utterly pretentious and boring.

Boring is not fun.

Sure there are probably a fair number of folks out there who are top notch at the craft and they can consistently pump out great loaf after great loaf but most of us still produce the more-than-occasional bread bomb.

And we DO blog about it. That's part of the adventure and the fun, making the bread, seeing how it comes out and writing about it, wether it's great, mediocre or a laff-riot. And we learn from it. The blog is just sharing that experience, it's not showing off loaf after loaf of prize winning quality product. It's sharing what we did no matter the outcome.

Want to see some bombs? Go to the earlier posts on most people's bread blogs before they'd honed their skills. Or even after a while, they (hopefully) will still show off a total dud when it happens. If they hide those, that's a shame. It's from the mistakes you learn what works and what doesn't.

Don't hesitate to start your own blog because you're under the incorrect idea only vastly experienced bread makers blog their process. Blog because you want to share your own travels as you learn and get better. You want to document your building expertise and, on the way, enlighten others who may also be intimidated and let them see it's OK to make mistakes.

I've also found keeping a blog has forced me to pay more attention to the steps I was doing because I would have to explain this or that step or process I followed (even if it's following a recipe) later on. Why did I do it this way over that? What am I doing at this stage and why? Or I do something and later write up that "I did this but it didn't work like I wanted so next time I'll try that".

Blogging is not just showing off, it's a learning tool, a recording of your process. And that is still applicable if the process you follow missed the mark. Post it anyway.

Besides, it's fun and when you do make a loaf that turns out great, it's a neat place to show it off.

Don't throw in the towel before you even start the game! Fire up a blog (here, on Wordpress.com, Blogspot.com, your own website, etc., etc.) and see how you like it. Post your successes AND your bombs, your learning process, your a-HA! moments. Worst case scenario: you stop. So, what’s the downside again? 

You must have missed the brick in my blog...!   I like looking back to see my improvments on many of the breads I have blogged.

Sylvia

You have to remember that beauty is sometimes only "crust" deep.  I've made some nice looking breads that when you cut into them, they're soggy, dense and more like pulled taffy than bread.

The good thing is - flour is relatively inexpensive in the general scheme of things,  and if you have animals - they are VERY grateful for your flops.  add a little butter and if they're like mine - they're in heaven!  Some of my bread flops are more like dog bones anyway.

If every loaf came out perfect, you'd never learn how to avoid mistakes and you wouldn't appreciate the goods ones as much as you should.

A Tale of Two Weeks

Four years of regular breadbaking, three years contributing to TFL.  Here are my results from Fathers Day weekend:

On the left is my weekly sandwich rye, now typically a sourdough.  On the right are two loaves of Vermont Country Sourdough (recipe originally from King Arthur, modified somewhat by me).  Pies in the background by my wife Julie the Piemaster.   Cherries from the 30 lb bucket my younger son brought back from Door County WI! 

Looks great.  I must be one of those Experienced Breadbakers(tm) you read about on TFL.  Well, let's go back in time a full week:

That pancake-shaped object on the left is supposed to be my sandwich loaf.  At 3/4"-1" high and mostly crust it wasn't usable for much of anything!  The loaves on the right were supposed to be mixed-grain sourdough white; when I realized the dough was too weak to shape as batards I put it in the loaf pans.  The result was barely edible but quite brick-like.

So there you have it: from the valley one week to the peak the next.  That's how it goes in the world of bread.  Try something simple for a few weeks in a row, get the hang of it, then branch out.  Have fun!

sPh

...and daily I quietly express my gratitude for TFL, and my having found it, sometimes to my wife, occasionally to a friend, a neighbor, or family; mostly just in my thoughts whille I browse through the latest posting.

What we've got here is Community!

The "New Oxford American Dictionary" has, as its third definition of "community": "a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals"

Now, to me, that describes to a tee what exists here in cyberspace among us. It's a lot more than simply http:// thefresh....

So, for this moment, I'll not be quiet. Thanks TFL for all you are for me, a place to meet like-minded folks; folks who critque my goofs kindly, praise my successes laviously , and share their knowledge gladly.

I'm a huge fan of Community!

David G

Hi Dave,

I teach kids, and one of the things I tell them is to not give up or get discouraged so easily.  Were you born walking?  Of course not.  None of us were.  But we learned how to do it.

It's the same with any skill--it takes time, practice, hard work.  Sure, some get it more easily than others.  But persistence will pay off.

So please keep on trying, and start a blog anyway.  One thing is for sure--before I started mine, I didn't REALLY appreciate how hard it was to take a good food picture.  I'm getting better at it.

The other thing I wanted to say was that I love reading even posts about failures, because we can still learn from them.  They just are not as amusing, nor as exciting, as when things turn out great.

I haven't made bread in a while, but being back here is making me hungry for more!

I want to try my hand at some ciabatta so I can make bahn mi with my own bread.  Check out my blog for more details...

Aloha,

Alina

Find award-winning vegetarian and vegan recipes at my blog:

http://almostveganinparadise.wordpress.com