gcook17's blog

Every summer we're faced with the pleasant task of trying to figure out how to use all the fruit from our trees.  Most of the fruit gets ripe at the same time and it's not possible to eat it all fresh.  Right now the apricots, apriums (cross between apricot and plum), plums, and sour cherries are almost all ripe.  The fig tree, which usually has 2-3 crops per year, is also beginning to have some ripe fruit.  Carol doesn't like jams or jellies so that rules out one method of preserving them.  I like jam but I rarely eat toast, so I don't go through the

This just came out of the oven a few minutes ago and I thought it looked too good not to take a picture.  It's Hamelman's Pain au Levain with Mixed Sourdough Starters.  It has two levains: a wheat and a rye.  It's not cool yet so no crumbshot.  It didn't feel over-proofed but after slashing and sliding it into the oven it seemed to get awfully flat.  It certainly sprang back though.  I made a loaf of volkornbrot that came out about 15 minutes earlier and because of the strong, sweet rye smell I didn't expect the smell of this bread to be very noticeable but its

These pastries are made of croissant dough and filled with a fig filling.  Apparently lunettes are, among other things, eyeglasses in French.  You could use any croissant dough you liked, but the dough I used for these was whole wheat with a sponge from ABAP, by Suas.  2 lbs.

About a year ago my wife, Carol, and I went to my favorite coffee store, Barefoot Coffee in Santa Clara (California). Carol doesn't like coffee so she picked out a pastry from the pastry display. It was something I'd never heard of before called a Kouign Aman. It was crispy, crunchy, sweet and buttery. It was so good that we started making trips to Barefoot just to get the pastry. We eventually found out they're made at Satura Cakes in Los Altos. Now, whenever we're in the mood for a really good pastry we go get a kouign aman.

Doesn't it drive you crazy when you scale a formula down to a size you can make at home and you end up needing .011 oz. of yeast? You can do this if you have a scale that will measure in grains or fractions of grams.  A grain is a unit of weight that is 1/7000 of a pound or about 1/438 of an oz.  When I'm making poolish for my home-size batch of croissants and find that I need .005 oz.

Trying to figure out what to do with starter discards is a common topic. But, what about pastry dough? I always end up with odd bits of tart dough or puff pastry that are left over from something I made. About a week ago my twelve-year-old niece, Carli, was visiting from Texas and, in addition to numerous loaves of bread, we made several tarts with pate sucree and puff pastry. After she left, the leftover dough pieces sat around in the fridge all week and needed to be used, frozen, or thrown away.

I have a niece who is interested in baking and I was going to buy her the King Arthur videos on Artisan Bread and Blitz Puff Pastry.  When I went to their web site I was sad to see that the DVD on Artisan Breads was unavailable.  I don't know if they will make some more and sell them again or if that's the end of it.  I sure hope they continue selling them because it was a really helpful video for me when I was starting the make hearth breads with wet dough.

 I was getting tired of covering my mixing bowl with plastic wrap to keep the dough from drying out while it fermented.  For me, unrolling, tearing, stretching plastic wrap has always been like wrestling an octopus.  Besides, I hate throwing it away after using it for a few hours.  I wanted to find a dough fermentation bin that had a top that would keep in the moisture but wasn't airtight.  I was buying half sheet pans at my local Smart-n-Final and noticed what looked like the perfect containers.

I've been reading the forum for awhile and posted a few replies but I thought I should introduce myself.  My name is Greg and I live in Mountain View, CA.  I was a math geek in college and most of my life after that I've been a software engineer/project manager.  I recently graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary.  It's not clear what I'll do next for a living, but I'm currently doing part-time software contract work and handyman/small construction jobs.  My hobbies & interests have included wood-working, metal-working, photography, scuba divin