Blog posts

I made a simple dough this morning with the intent of making some type of a picnic bread today. Something with cheese and onion, perhaps olives or sausage mixed in. But then we ended up picnicing at the lake today as well. After a long day in the sun, I just couldn't face the prospect of baking in 90 degree weather. Actually, it wasn't the baking as much as having the house heat up, particularly the upstairs bedroom, which get sweltering on hot days.

Thanks to this site, I baked my very first sourdough loaf today after two weeks of preparation :) Yippeeee!!! It certainly is not the perfect loaf (quite flat), but I am just happy that I grew yeast from scratch that caused any rising action at all (thanks to a mixture of Floydm & sourdolady's starter recipes and advice)... | | Here is a pictoral account of my adventure...Day 1 is the day I began making my homemade starter. | Day 5...my first big day of "bubble action" in my homemade starter!!!

Coffee Bread Pudding Recipe Last week I found myself with a huge tupperware container full of staling bread of various types, so I made this bread pudding (from a mixture of different recipes I found on the internet) and it was a big hit at tea time. I want to record the recipe here before I lose the scrap piece of paper I wrote it on as I went...

My attempt at 100% Rye Finnish sourdough bread. It seems that it's hung by the ceiling on a pole all year round. That explains the hole in the centre. It also seems that this bread's suppose to keep all year round especially in the cold & cruel Scandinavian winter. It's gonna be winter here too, in Aus... :) Well, since i lack a pole, that also explains the string tied around it.

For father's day, I chose to stick around the house, play with the kids, and bake. I made Dan Lepard's Flax Seed Wheat Bread again. Really good stuff. The big dessert was a cheesecake (store bought) with a raspberry sauce made with fresh, local berries.

I don't know if anyone else noticed, but today smiddlet posted the 1000th node on this site. Thank you, everyone who has contributed and made this site a useful place to visit. I continue to be slammed at work, which accounts for my inability to provide fresh content here. There has also been the spring cleaning, getting the garden going, family visits, hyperactive children, and a nasty outbreak of moths (clothes moths, not grain moths) in our house to keep me occupied. I am determined to bake and post new content again soon.

Hello. I am new to this and new to bread baking. Have been trying all types of recipes from several books but cannot seem to find out how to calculate adding oat groats and other types of grain to bread. Is there a ratio to follow? Do the grains need to be soaked first? Any assistance would be GREAT! Thank you in advance!

In addition to baking bread, I have another obsession: The ancient Asian game of Go. As the game is well over 3000 years old, a whole host of proverbs has grown up around it. One of my favorites is the following:

"Just one game," they said. That was yesterday.

Friday night, I may as well have said to myself,

"Just one loaf ...."

(Photos in the full post) I really didn't intend to bake all night. Really, I didn't. But I'd gotten home a bit early, and I knew it would be a busy weekend.

The sourdough starter recipe provided by SourdoLady worked wonderfully. Having had some less than satisfying results with previous sourdough attempts, I was unsure of what to expect with this starter. Since first mixing it up a couple of weeks ago, it has been bubbling happily and smelling deliciously tangy. Since orange juice was on hand, I used that instead of pineapple juice. It sounded peculiar when I first read it, but I'm happy to report that it proved itself (pun intended) this weekend.