OldWoodenSpoon's blog

Last night brought the fourth in this series of attempts to bake a proper loaf of this wonderful tasting bread.  In short, this bake offered only incremental improvement over previous efforts, but the essential problem still remains unresolved.  In this bake one of the two loaves promptly caved in upon removal from the baking pans for cooling.  This happened within 60 to 90 seconds of removing the loaves from the pan.  It happens quickly enough that you can watch the sides pull in.  In this bake, however, only one of the loaves did this.  That might be progress

I baked this recipe for the third time tonight, and I am still scratching my head.   For this iteration I made the following adjustments:

1)  Reduced the malt to 10 grams, based on Eric Hanner's parallel bake comments and results here.
2)  Reduced my mixing time to 10 minutes to reduce the level of dough development.
3)  Added a wire rack to the middle of my oven to avoid baking directly on my quarry tiles.

After last night's poor results on the Vienna Bread recipe from Inside The Jewish Bakery, I received some excellent tips and advice.  I wasted no time putting them to work tonight in a fresh bake.  Unfortunately I am still not getting it right.  I have the same result, albeit less severly, in this next bake. 

I baked two loaves of Vienna Bread from Inside the Jewish Bakery tonight, and have a problem I have not seen before with pan breads.  Since pictures are worth a thousand words, here they are:

and the crumb shot:

A couple of days ago David G. posted this recipe in his blog here.  Being a chocoholic that refuses recovery or treatment, I could/would not resist the temptation to indulge.  First, though, I must point out in my defense that I have never baked a biscotti before.  Ever.  They came out well enough to rapidly become an endangered item in the kitchen though!

I have been quiet on TFL, mostly, for several months, posting a comment in a thread only rarely, and not taking/making/having time to post any of my baking.  Life has been good, but very busy, and so has work.  Good, and very, very busy.  What time I've had free I've not wanted to spend in this same chair, and at the same computer, where I make my living all day (and night too, sometimes), but I have still found some time to bake.  Not a lot of time, especially last spring and summer, but some.  I can proudly say, however, that no "store bread" has come into this ho

I went looking for a recipe that would use up some whole wheat and bulgar grain I accidentally mixed up.  I did not find that recipe (yet), but I did stumble upon this variation on Hamelman's Five Grain Levain posted by MadAboutB8 on her blog recently.  Thank you Sue!  As a result, I got distracted into this recipe, but since I had no sunflower seeds I substituted some raw pumpkin seeds we had in the cupboard.  I used Pendleton Mills Power (bread) flour, with home-milled hard white winter wheat for the whole w

Twelve days ago I posted this topic about my troubles with an all white flour version of my successful whole wheat and rye starter.  Since then I have been nursing that starter with multiple daily feedings, and keeping it quarantined from my other starter to avoid cross-contamination.  Based on research, and excellent direct advice, the issue was diagnosed by David Snyder and Debra Wink (Thanks to both of you!) as thiol degradation and I proceeded to try to "feed through it".

I love beer breads, so when I saw the Team USA formula featured in Crust and Crumb (Reinhart) I had to try it. 

from my sourdough starter problems, I switched to commercial yeast breads for the weekend.  I've had "Crust and Crumb" out from the bookmobile for a while now, and thought these Peppery Polenta Crackerbread sounded good.  Turns out they are quite good!