Blog posts

I did a lot of baking recently, but wasn't able to post very much as we had family visiting.  They left today to return to the snowy midwest, so I will get back to a normal baking schedule.  We did have a wonderful time over the holidays, and I will miss them.

My niece loves sourdough, so I made quite a bit of bread during their visit.

With the new office job, I find myself making more pan breads, perfect for a sandwich to take to the office.  I have tried many a recipe, ended up building from my Vienna Bread recipe's formula, replacing ingredients, and tweaking percentages around.  I finally landed on this bread, exactly what I wanted in a brown bread.  This bread makes for great sandwich bread, toasted and dipped in runny eggs in the morning, made into toast points for spreads, and with cheeses for mid-day snack on the weekends.  The use of a yeast instead of sourdough, along with all of the whole gr

I am new to bread baking having done most of my baking in the cake arena.  Anyway, after a trip to Montreal and tasting the finest bread to have ever touched my palette from one of the local boulangeries, (the bread put my sandwich filing to shame!) I have chosen to set out on the oft trodden path of trying to bake some myself.  I  purchased a few books by some of the usual suspects mentioned on this site and decided to give the Forkish Saturday 75% Whole Wheat Bread a go.

Ken Forkish calls this "Overnight Country Blonde," but that doesn't describe the method I used.

Lucy originally set out to do her take on combining Karin’s take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread and Karin’s Great Wild Rice bread.  Both of these breads are on our favorite list and on Lucy’s top three breads for various years.

After my numerous trial and errors journey of trying to grow my very first sourdough starter I am pleased to announce that this morning a miracle happened!!!she finally ripened (she passed the float test with awesome bubbles and a mildly sweet + acidic/sour aroma) and me being an eager beaver I decided to have a go at making a sourdough bread using the Tartine 80% hydration whole wheat recipe and it worked,I have made my very first sour dough bread,elated best describes my feeling right now!!! Look at the crumb on that baby... :-)  

Scalded Rye Bread

It's been a worthwhile experience. I feel I've learned a lot of the basics for handling rye flours. Four of eighteen I'll add to my modest repertoire: Rye Sticks, Milwaukee Rye, Zeltan (Tyrolean Fruit Bread) and Rye Squares; I'll likely tweak them all to better match the flavors I want.

Decided it was time to have a go at using sourdough only in my favourite yeasted bread.  

the recipe (From Rose levy Berambaum's Bread Bible) uses white bread flour but I chose to use a little whole wheat in the mix.

Grain soaker - 236 gm mixed grains,113 gm hot water,9 gm salt soaked overnight 

final dough

237 gm bread flour

65 gm whole wheat flour

12 gm gluten

153 gm water

12 gm honey

Levain - 85 gm 125% hydration

Happy New Year to all, from a newbie to bread and to this forum!

I agree with CAphyl: There's something special about the notion of giving a yeast bread as a holiday gift. And I could be biased by my recent discovery of wild yeast, but I love the idea even more if the loaf is a sourdough.

Or last 2 bakes of the year.  Took a 2 week hiatus from my bread reservation program and put the culture to sleep in the fridge for a week.  It is back out and coming back into it's own but it needs 3-4 days of regular refreshing before it's ready to build a levain.  Should have thought to freeze some bread for the break.  I didn't so I made French Bread based on the Tradition baguette formula incorporating 5% whole Rye for part of the flour.  I made 750g batard's proofed en couche.