Blog posts

After my major panettone fail, I decided to makes these sesame crackers for the first time.  I found a recipe on the net while looking for things to use the egg whites leftover from the panettone dough.  I’ve long loved these crackers and have bought them at a local Chinese grocery store.  I’m glad to have found a recipe that uses the egg whites and in fact is super easy.

Inspired by Moe’s comment about not being able to good rye bread as well as requests from some of my customers for a good seeded rye bread. From their comments it seemed what they were looking for was likely a light caraway rye and not a dark 100% rye. So with that in mind I looked through my archives for something that might suit and came across a formula for Jewish Sour Rye that I hadn’t made since 2014. Notes from that bake said it came from this site possibly by way of the cookbook Secrets of a Jewish Bakery.

Usual 6 sticks. I only used SD levain no YW  but as last time I used 160g very ripe/ ready levain instead of 80g. They are a tad more sour than I like. But my taster loved them. 

The crumb is very very shiny which I haven’t noticed before. I’m going to add 3% non diastatic malt for browning in the next iteration. 

Another bake using my middlings levain technique. The original post is here.
This time I increased the wholegrain content to 40%: 20% was home milled Einkorn; for the other 20% I used Marriages Golden wholegrain flour which is a white whole wheat flour. I used this as it has a milder flavour than most of the whole wheat grains/flours available in the UK. It's also nice and strong, which I wanted as the Einkorn is pretty weak.

Lately, I have been fiddling with a new sourdough.  I finally got the ingredients and amounts fixed around a month ago, but still wasn't entirely satisfied.  Then I made a little tweak and kazam!  Suddenly it all fell together.  The tweak wasn't either ingredients or amounts, as those have stayed constant.  

A Natural Bloom is where the bread unfolds during the oven spring giving a unique and natural rise. No need to cut, and so far, always Blooms. 

This style of folding has worked very well for higher hydration and mixed grain breads.

The bread in the picture is a part Khorasan with added Khorasan porridge. 

Kurt

I had some leftover wild rice (which also had red rice and brown rice in the blend) so not wanting it to go to waste I decided to add it to a dough.  I don’t think I’ve added rice in this way in a long long time.  I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.  I also had a bit of whole kamut left so decided to use it up in this bread as well.

These are the best baguettes I’ve made to date - light, crispy, very good flavor, crust and texture.  The recipe is based on Ian Lowe’s Baguettes with Old Dough (Pate Fermentee), with my own modifications.

Years ago, I took the Baguette class as KAF, but I never quite achieved their quality. It was an excellent class, taught by Jeffrey Hamelman, but I was new to more serious baking, and the concepts were foreign to me. Over the years, I tried to improve on my results, but usually produced somewhat heavy baguettes that didn’t rise well. 

2026 - Cream pie challenge
Notes: while I am head over heals happy with this outcome. I am disappointed that I made an inexperienced amateur mistake. The glaze is too thick! Other than that, my bride said it was delicious! 
Smile...

The finished product