varda's blog

Recently I decided it was time to try to learn to make baguettes.    My strategy has been to make baguettes every day, both to get practice and to try different approaches.    Since I am making them so frequently and often tucked in the middle of other bakes, I don't always have good records.  That hasn't been much of an issue, as these are practice baguettes and haven't been that terrific.    The other day, though, amidst baking other bread, I made the tastiest baguettes ever.    Unfortunately my records were incomplete, and

Lately I've been baking a lot, as I decided my family's appetites did not quite coincide with either the type or amount of bread that I wanted to bake.   This has led to a conundrum, as I have occasionally made a great many loaves and then ended the day with no bread in the house.   Suddenly my barely tolerated bread has become a must have, so I have to make up the difference with a few more loaves after the big bake is over.   Yesterday I made these loaves which all went to good homes by the end of the day.  

This morning I baked a sprouted wheat loaf.   I had made my first one the other day and it was an ugly duckling but delicious, so my plan was to make a prettier bigger one.   I succeeded on the bigger.

Some time ago I posted on a chocolate borodinsky.  This was scaled to a mammoth 1.4 Kg to fill my 4x4x9 Pullman pan.  That's a lot of Borodinsky particularly since certain people in my domicile eschew high ryes.   (And eschew doesn't mean chew.)   So what do you do if you want a  bit of Borodinsky, or you are baking for other folks who love carbs, but not that many of them.   One cannot piece Borodinsky loaves as you could say a pain de mie.  Paste doesn't piece.

It was late.   I had three breads to prepare for.   This meant two starters, two soakers and a biga.   My eyes drooped.   I was almost done - once I made the second soaker, and then the biga, I could go to sleep.   Yet something was wrong and I didn't know what.   I looked down.   Instead of holding a bag of whole wheat flour, I was holding a bag of whole rye flour.  And I had already made the biga and the soaker for whole wheat sandwich bread with rye instead of wheat.   No rest for the weary.

Recently I posted on a bake of Syd's Asian style pain de mie, and Janet commented that she was going to make it with her white whole wheat home milled flour.   I decided to try something similar.    Instead of white whole wheat, I used my golden flour which is home milled hard red whole wheat with some of the bran and some coarse flour sifted out.    I believe the closest official name to this would be high extraction flour, probably around 90%.

When Floyd posted his Hokkaido Milk Bread I just had to try it.    Finally I got to it, and tasted it and then thought, I've made this before, even though I knew I'd never made a bread called Hokkaido bread.    I went back to the databanks and found that a year and a half ago, I made   Syd's Asian Style

The other day I was baking a lot of bread, and had excess white starter on my hands.   I knew that I had (or would have) too much bread on hand to make more, but what about later in the week?   Maybe I would run out and wouldn't have time to bake.    So I took my excess starter, added flour, water and salt, mixed it up, put it in a lidded tub and stuck it in the refrigerator.   Two days later, sure enough the bread had run out.   So I removed the tub from the refrigerator.   The dough was totally aerated, but did not have a so

I have never been one to put extra stuff into bread.   Flour and water all the way.   And yet, resolve weakens, fruit beckons, fresh loafers keep on posting.    What can one do?    A rhetorical question of course.    The simple answer is throw in a few dried cranberries.   I had already developed a nice seeded levain (after tasting Jong Yang's delcious one at the TFL Boston meet-up)  and thought - just swap out the seeds for the cranberries.   It works.   Two completely different breads on th