Blog posts

Touki Bouki: Varying from horrifying, beautiful, confusing, funny, and back to beautiful, this demands a rewatch, very powerful images

Nazi Literature in the Americas: Bolano sets up a perfect ending to the novel. The final chapter is a gut punch so unexpected and shocking that it recontextualises the rest of the book; no longer are the frightful entries merely abstract and historical encyclopedia entries but rather real personnages, real events, real suffering.

A while back I had made this Hamelman "Farmer's Bread" with yogurt, per his directions, and found it boring. But after a friend dropped off some home-made Quark cheese this week, I decided to give it another go since he mentioned he was recreating a quark bread from his days in germany. And it's really good!  A nice pain-au-levain type taste in only 4 hours start to finish.

This is a follow-up to Precaud's interesting post on enhancing oatiness. And my, what a journey. I love my oats, and have lots of experience making them for granola, incorporating a portion into my bread and so forth, but at a high percentage, oats do very funny things. 

I had a bread party in the office a few days ago and brought three breads:

Sourdough Bread with Spelt and T85 Flours

David M. Snyder

September, 2024

While I am very happy with the multigrain sourdough bread I have been making in recent years, I am still interested in trying new flour mixes. In this instance, I have been wanting to use some Central Milling T85 flour I ordered, prompted by Maurizio Leo’s fondness for this flour and inspired by his “Rustico” sourdough bread recipe in “The Perfect Loaf.”

With all of the discussion around biga on thefreshloaf lately, I thought I'd owe it to myself to faithfully make Abel's 90% biga bread which has become one of those famous recipes here. This time I tried to make it exactly as per the recipe. In the last month I've tried Rene's idea of a 50% biga with sourdough, and I've also tried a similar idea of a long 24 hour fermented biga made with sourdough at 90% biga.

I'm making three loaves for the office bread party next week, and in addition to the 40% rye and 60% spelt, I thought I will bring this...decadent loaf.

This is a follow-up bake to my 90% hydration ciabatta minis using different levain proportions. From that experiment I became more confident of using up to 50% rye levain in my dough, so I decided to apply it to this bake.

The goal is an everyday family loaf that has 1) good flavour; 2) extremely subdued sour tang; 3) is not too dense; 4) does not require much mixing; and 5) has most of the whole grains in the pre-ferment for easier digestion (husband suffers).

During the Infinity Bread Community Bake, I created an Infinity Soda Bread. See it at 

https://www.thefreshloaf.com/comment/529736#comment-529736

Today's bake is nearly the same recipe except I leavened it with sourdough starter instead of baking soda.

I made a batch of rieska (Finnish flatbread) this week using the recipe on KAB's website. I made it once before using the optional barley flour instead of rye flour; it was delicious. Most recipes from Finnish websites seem to use barley instead of rye.