Lazy Loafer's blog

Hi all. Sorry it's been so long since I was active on the site. After our big trip to Australia and New Zealand last autumn, then Christmas, we decided to sell our house. It took a while to get it ready to sell, and part of that 'getting ready' was storing all my bread-baking equipment away out of sight, and not baking for customers anymore. The house is still on the market so I'm just baking for the family now.

After some inspiration from recent posts about different kinds of yeast water folks are making, I revived one I'd had neglected in my fridge for about a year. It was originally made with plums from my back yard, but I ended up maintaining the apple one I made at the same time and ignoring the plum one, until now. I took it out - it looked and smelled fine, so I scooped out the depleted plum pulp and dumped in a handful of fresh blackberries. After two days it was beautifully fizzy and smelled great!

Every now and then I go to Peter Reinhart's "Bread Revolution" for something different. I've been meaning to try sprouted pulp bread for some time, and the time was right. I have a sack of Kamut (Khorasan wheat) that I don't use much because it's just too hard and difficult to mill by hand. Like milling gravel into sand - the resulting flour is very coarse and sandy. I sprouted some a while back, dried it and milled it into flour, which was easier than the unsprouted grain but still time consuming to dry it properly.

I finally got around to baking this bread; had it bookmarked for ages! As it is blueberry season here, and I happened to have some cream cheese handy, I thought of it and went ahead and baked it. So good! Here's the original post (in case you don't have it bookmarked). :)

I made a big batch (9) of the Scape & Asiago Levain today - a sourdough with roasted garlic scapes and Asiago cheese. My starter has been a little slow lately, and I also had to add two loaves worth of starter to the batch quite late (a late order), so some of the starter was not at all ripe (smelled like wet flour and had little gas).

Today I baked a big (10 loaves) batch of Forkish's Harvest Bread from FWSY. This is a poolish bread with a high percentage of pre-fermented flour, a good proportion of whole wheat flour (stone ground from a local farm) and added wheat germ and bran. It's a lovely dough to handle and bake. I made the poolish in the morning, then mixed the dough in the evening, putting it in the fridge for an overnight retard after about 1.5 hours fermenting at room temperature.

I really tested my knowledge and experience the other day. I had a bit of firm biga left from something else I was making and I hate wasting stuff, so I decided to make it into a loaf of bread. I did not measure anything for this, at all, so can't give you the recipe, but here's what I did:

This is one of the prettiest breads I bake - Buckwheat Cranberry Levain! I used to make it just for autumn / winter, but it is such a favourite that I decided to put it in the baking rotation today. This time I baked it in cast iron pots seam-side up, and the resulting natural burst is quite attractive. The original recipe was inspired by cmatecun's Buckwheat Cherry Levain, but I've probably modified somewhat over time.

I had a request from a new customer for Rosemary bread the other day, so started poking around looking at recipes. There were previous posts on TFL about Daniel Leader's rosemary filone in "Local Breads" with some indication of difficulty in reproducing his results, but as I have the book I thought I'd give it a try. Being me, I didn't just make one or two but took orders for 11 and made 12, hoping it would turn out!

So, I made a big pot of caramelized onions the other day, and wanted to try various recipes. I was also inspired by a discussion we had about using beer in sourdough. So that serendipity of events led to a bake of Hamelman's Beer bread with added caramelized onions!