foodslut's blog

Haven't posted in a while, but need some advice, so sharing this over a number of forums for advice.

I've been finding my pan loaves are coming out tacky & sticky in the middle.  I don't encounter this problem with my free-form loaves.

It's been a while since my last blog post, but this one, I wanted to share.

I was on a bit of a roll making chapatis for Indian food my sweetie has been making, so I bought some atta flour.  The smallest bag I could find (Golden Temple Wheat Atta) was 10 lbs. - that's a LOT of chapatis, so I tried to figure out what else I could do with this flour.

My oven has been out of commission for a few days, and the front-panel computer gizmo needed to make it bake when you hit bake (instead of broil until the "too hot" alarm goes off) is on order. 

So, how'd I do on last year's list I posted?

1)  I will continue to share home-made bread.  Did that pretty well -- my end of year total for dough produced was over 324 kilograms (more than 714 lbs), with (my guess) more than 80% of that gifted.

2)  I will move more.  Haven't done enough of that.

3)  I will do more of what I want.  Still trying.

In the interest of increasing the odds of my following said resolutions, here's this year's short & sweet list:

I'm seeing more people, for various reasons, take up gluten-free (GF) eating.  I've always been hesitant about trying GF loaves because of head-scratching over the various gums needed to replace the gluten that's not there due to no wheat being used.

I was reading online this week about baking bread in slow cookers (more here and here), so I decided to make a 3.2 kg (~7 lbs) batch of my house loaf - here's the formula ....

.... and bake three 800 gram (~28 ounce) boules in the oven, and one in our trusty old slow cooker/crock pot.

I've been hemming and hawing for a while about trying the Lahey technique, but when I managed to find an interesting ceramic cooking vessel for $7 at a thrift store ....

.... I thought it was time to give it a go.

Used an 80% hydration dough, with a pain de campagne combination of flours (88% unbleached white, 6% whole wheat, 6% dark whole wheat rye) in a 475 degree oven, 30 minutes covered and 30 minutes uncovered.

After coming across this post here at TFL while looking for something else, I thought I'd give baking with spent grains a try.

Tried a batch of croissants a la Bertinet "Crust" formula, with one change - replaced 1/3 of the white flour with stone-ground whole wheat to make them a weeeee bit more healthy.

Found the dough just a bit harder to roll out, but I was quite pleased with the results