dabrownman's blog

We have a tradition of doing pizza for New Year’s Eve.  We also have a tradition of making resolutions too.  This year, Lucy’s resolution was to dedicate herself to AI programming so that she could help mankind transition from biological beings to machine ones eventually ….. so that we would have a fighting chance to defend ourselves against future robots that humans will create will eventually turn on us and want to kill us.  Isn’t that precious?

After 2 weeks of making new weird stuff; a witch yeast and a cooked potato starter, Lucy decided to combine them with our rye sour starter to make a triple levain bread quite unlike many other triple levain breads usually available everywhere else.

With Lucy’s success, after 3 tries, at the Methodist Ladies, 1906 Witch Yeast, Lucy thought she could move on to a more difficult starter - especially now that she has finally passed the last of the aluminum foil wrapped Hershey’s Kisses she ate a couple of days before Christmas – nearly a whole bag of them.  So much for chocolates being poisonous for dogs too.

This week we were reminded once again that we aren’t as hip, modern and advanced as we think we are when to comes to bread and most other things.  We also don’t give our ancient ancestors as much credit and due as we should.  I published an article by Samuel earlier this week , Brewing and baking, in Ancient Egypt that shows how advanced they were in baking bread and making beer.

This year's pot garden for salad fits the bill for 2 who love salad.

2015 Dabrownman’s TFL Blog Index

1/1/2015 - New Years Eve Pizza

1/2/2015 - 50 % Whole Grain Sprouted 8 Grain SD/YW with Japanese Black Rice & Seeds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p5zNpxxgok

We had this left over white starter that we converted from the 3 rd day toss of the rye starter we made for last Friday’s rye SD bread bake and needed a recipe to use a bit of it up.  Lucy came through with a sprouted 5 grain recipe that included 50% whole grains and some cracked flax seeds. 

Lucy has been wanting to make this one since we ran across it while searching for pumpernickel bread recipes at about the same time another Fresh Loafian was asking about Latvian Bread recipes. 

We thought it an odd one since the recipe called for scalding apple cider and then adding it rye four with a bit of starter and leaving it covered to make the for 24 hours to make the levain. 

Lucy went back to a more simple recipe this week that had some overlooked ingredients of late hoping to take her sprouted grains baking in another direction.  As it turned out, the only ingredient we don’t use often in this bake was the hazelnuts – the 2nd most overlooked nut in breads after pistachios.

Old school NY bagels  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_xTIrT_aiI&feature=youtu.be

One of our favorite things to do with bread is to make them the ‘old school’ way.  You can bread using sourdough made from scratch for that bake like a pumpernickel or you can use an old school method not used much anymore too.  Another fun thing about bread is to take old school and make it current and edgy.