Blog posts

Love these ciabatta with stiff biga, used as sandwich rolls. Each roll is its own mini-ciabatta! Hamelman formula but with bassinage coil folds by hand. Great with ham or cheese.

Ciabattini: 6 X 90-100g. 

We are visiting family in Newfoundland for 1.5 weeks now and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread for my brother in law.  The bread had to travel well and stay fresh for a while.  A lot of people seem to enjoy a nutty seedy loaf so decided to make a milk bread.  I had sunflowers, pumpkin seeds and walnuts and wanted to amp up the walnut flavour again by adding toast walnut oil.  Not everyone likes a 100% wholegrain loaf so I decided to use whole wheat for all the levain and tangzhong and the rest of the dough would be bread flour.

i have been doing a bit of development work for David at the Lupin Co here in Perth and we are at the stage where i needed to bake some of the breads ive been working on that will be photographed tomorrow by a professional photographer.  Jessica is also a local bread baker so looking forward to seeing her work.

i made 3 different doughs today and the aim is to keep them relatively simple for the home baker 

The one i am featuring here is a plain white dough that has 20% Lupin flakes and 5% Lupin Flour in the mix.

     Grilling season is upon us so I needed to make some soft tasty rolls for burgers.  These are pretty straight forward and ended up just as I expected.

I used a combination of freshly milled and double sifted Butlers Gold whole wheat flour from Barton Springs Mill and KAF bread flour plus some KAF AP in the starter.  Softened butter along with the ricotta cheese really added to the softness of the crumb and the honey added just enough sweetness to pull it all together.

I have not made a bread with dates for quite some time and for whatever reason it popped into my head the other day that I needed to make one.

This bake also used some purple sweet potatoes that I baked and then mashed up.  I decided to add a little bit into the levain to see what would happen.  It did a nice job of making a slightly sweet levain and when added with the sweet dates and the rest of the purple sweet potatoes the flavor on this bake was amazing. 

Debra Wink’s English Muffins with Biga.

I’ve tried several different English Muffin recipes and keep coming back to these, magnificent flavour and crumb.

Should bagels touch when baked? 

I have been aware of Maurizio Leo through his social media postings for some time. He is a home baker, but an extremely serious one who comes from a restaurant family. Eventually, I discovered his blog (ThePerfectLoaf dot com)  and found him to be an articulate and generous mentor for home bakers. More recently, he has published a baking book. It is more on the model of Tartine Bread or Forkish's books than, say, Hamelman"s. But Leo's recipes are very well documented and look really good. His book, "The Perfect Loaf," won a James Beard Award this year. 

I first saw this type of shaped steamed bao when I borrowed Kristina Cho’s book called Mooncakes and Milkbread from the library.  My brother in law then emailed me a recipe for them out of the blue so I decided to make them.  Unfortunately my brother in law is no where near us so I’m unable to share this with him.  I’m pretty happy with how they turned out even if I didn’t do the twisting of the strips of dough prior to shaping them.

There is nothing like waking up and realizing there is no bread for your morning toast.  I ended up having to eat yogurt for breakfast!

I threw this loaf together with very little fuss, and 24 hours later there was bread. 

I mixed up what amounted to 175 g of ripe active starter at 100% hydration.

added:

290 g. of All purpose flour

204 g of hard white whole wheat

314 g of water

11 g. of salt

to the 175 g of levain.