Skibum's blog

I tried posting this one yesterday and tfl blew up on me when I pressed save. I got a black screen with lettering in white saying page not available. Will try this again.

Left to right a tag end of a pulla braid, some soft pull apart dinner rolls and in front NY style deli rye take three. I love the deli rye and this time I used barley malt syrup instead of brown sugar and used more onion and caramelized them down. This has made a wonderful sandwich bread.

On this rye bake, I brushed the excess flour from the banneton from the loaf with a soft brush and applied an egg wash to give the crust gloss. Perhaps my best take yet on Peter Reinhart's great recipe!

Peter's NY deli rye recipe from Bread Baker's Apprentice remains my favourite sandwich loaf and second favourite loaf, second to my beloved pulla.

Well I finally got what I was looking for with this bake!  Pretty much the same mix as the last two bakes of this recipe, but somehow with the first two, I got lazy and used a muffin tin. Buns were fine, but not pull apart shred able.

Well I haven't posted in more than a month, but have been busy baking different things. The dinner rolls are a take of P. Reinharts soft pull apart dinner rolls from ABED.  This batch of 325 grams total flour yielded 6 rolls at 104 grams each, so I thought why not bake them off in a muffin tin?

All of the my bakes are leavened with a refreshed liquid levain. Here is the formula for the rolls:

50 g levain

325 g bread flour

175 g milk, scalded

Well after a solid week of rain and very heavy rain the last couple of days the sum has finally come out. Shown is pulla left and double chocolate expresso cookies on the right. I bake a loaf of pulla every week or two and my rolling out of the braids and braiding is slowly getting better.

To Giada's recipe which follows, I added 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts. Yummmmm!

This has been a very enjoyable baking project.  This was the second half of the last focaccia dough that had rested in the fridge for 3 days prior to baking.  I changed up the herbed evoo using dried basil this time. I found the fresh basil used in the last batches tended to burn and become a little bitter. This is not an issue with the dried herbs: rosemary, basil, oregano and Italian seasoning.

Well friends, three days of steady rain have given me some time to bake.  I call this a successful bake as the crumb is nice and open and the crust has a real snap when you bight into it. Perfect with just herbed EVOO.

This was my second try at this classic Italian bread and finally a success! 

Formula is 350 g total flour @75% hydration. I used 50g liquid levain, 35g durham semolina, 240g BF, 1 tsp salt and 225g H2). I developed the dough as I would normally do then finished it as Mr. Reinhart suggests: a couple of letter folds with 30 minutes rest, then a thorough docking with fingertips and a drenching of herb oil. Lots of fresh basil, dried rosemary and all the Italian regular herbs into the oil.

I have been struggling for months with batards, scoring and getting proper bloom. Well, I have had success two bakes in a row now as a result in two new procedures. I would like to do a shout out to alphonso for the video he posted a while back. Thanks alan, your video has been most helpful to me!

The two small changes were to put the loaf into the fridge for the last 10 minutes of proofing and dipping my lame in water prior to scoring. Ear on the first bake at 200 grams and a half ear on this one at 370 grams. I will call this loaf VanGogh as it only has a half an ear.