Lazy Loafer's blog

This has got to be the absolutely best way to caramelize a bunch of onions (in this case, about 8 largish ones). Last night I sliced them all with the mandoline (still made me cry), filled up my crock pot and tossed them by hand with a few tablespoons of olive oil and a bit of salt.

They cooked overnight (about 10 hours) on low, then a couple more hours with the lid partly off to cook down the liquid. I'll now freeze them in 100 gram batches for use in all kinds of things!

I had a full load of 8 cast iron pots in the oven this morning. I had four of my Heart Bread loaves to bake for a customer, and I've been waiting for an opportunity to bake some of Ian's cream cheese breads, and I also added a couple of Tartine Porridge loaves to top up the load - this one made with Kamut flake porridge, walnuts and walnut oil (bought some the other day).

One of our Christmas traditions is to have strawberry crepes and bacon for breakfast Christmas morning. Which always results in a whole lot of bacon fat in a tin in the fridge. I've been meaning for some time to try this in bread, and didn't have any baking for customers this week, so this was my chance.

The basic recipe is a fairly simple sourdough:

• 85% bread flour
• 15% whole wheat flour
• 68% water
• 2% salt
• 25% levain (100% hydration)

Just for a twist, I used whole durum atta flour in place of the whole wheat flour.

This is one of those bakes that sort of comes together by accident. I had soaked some rye grains a while back, planning on using them in a pumpernickel, but it turned out I had soaked too much grain, so I drained the remainder and let them sit for a day. They sprouted (as they do), and I stuck the bowl in the fridge, planning on 'doing something' with them later. By the time I remembered to pull the bowl out a couple of days later they had mostly malted (i.e. they had a tangle of little rootlets along with the tiny sprouts).

I decided to take (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend 'off', meaning I won't be baking for either retail outlet for Saturday nor am I doing a regular bake for the subscribers on Sunday. Of course, I'm baking ten dozen Sweet Potato buns for them tomorrow, including half a dozen gluten free ones, and four loaves of Heart Bread for my special customer as well, but you know, relatively 'off'. Which means, of course, that we didn't have any bread for ourselves either (no leftovers to nick from the bread shop on Saturday).

Some of my customers asked if I was making buns for Thanksgiving dinner, so I said I'd give it a go. Sweet Potato buns seem to be just the thing. I did a sweep of this site and the internet in general to look at recipes; none quite filled the bill (the recipe needs to be easily scalable to several dozen buns and the ingredients can't be too expensive or difficult to handle, or time-consuming to prepare). So I tested and tweaked, and came up with the following.

One of my friends / customers recently had a heart attack and bypass surgery. He loves my bread, but his wife is understandably concerned about his diet, so I created a new bread for them based on some research into diet and cardiovascular health. There is evidence that whole grains, particularly oats, are related to reduced cardiovascular risk. Good fats can be found in olive oil and flax seeds, and sprouted flour and long, slow fermented sourdoughs may also have benefits (at least for digestibility if not heart health). Here's what I came up with:

Having managed to create two yeast waters, from plums and apples in my own garden, it was time to try them out to make some bread.

Well, you know me - I can't resist a challenge! And thanks so much to @Mini Oven for issuing this one. I had more fun with this than I've had in a long time. :)

Here in Victoria (BC, Canada) we're not quite on the path of totality for the eclipse but will have the best view in Canada (about 90% totality). That's assuming clear skies, of course.

So, after baking 75 loaves of bread in the one week since we've been back from holiday, what do I do for a break? Bake bread, of course! :) I was making "What do I do with all these green beans from the garden" minestrone for dinner, and needed some bread to go with it. All I had on hand was multigrain sandwich bread which didn't seem quite right with minestrone, so I figured it was high time I finally tried the most-bookmarked bread on this site - Jason's Quick Cocodrillo Ciabatta.