Blog posts

Bread baking really is a lot like the Wide World of Sports.  A really nice bake that lulls you into thinking you've 'conquered' a particular bread is often followed by a rude reality slap when a bake goes awry, leaving me, at any rate, wondering whether the former was just a lucky fluke or the latter a bad day.

Rarely do I experience both the high and low in a single day, but today's bakes managed to fill the bill. 

One of my goals in learning how to make bread was to be able to recreate a bread I ate as a child called tzitzel.   As I understand it, tzitzel mean caraway in Yiddish, and tzitzel is a rye bread with caraway and covered with cornmeal.   So far, despite many attempts and many different formulas, I have not come very close to recreating this memory bread.   Perhaps one can never recreate memory bread.    In any cases, my searches on this site, with its many rye bakers, led me to Greenstein's Secret of a Jewish Baker.   I have tried makin

Several days ago I made the Savory Bread from Bernard Clayton's Complete Book of Breads.  It is practically just a white loaf of bread (similar to a less-rich brioche) that before the final rise is rolled into a rectangle, spread with a seasoned butter, and rolled back up and placed in a loaf pan.  The butter ingredients include thyme, garlic, hot sauce, pepper, etc., so can imagine how good that would taste in a bread (now that I think about it, I could have added some red pepper flakes that I had sitting in the spice cabinet).  Anyway, it tasted very, very good.

I decided to start a blog to keep a log of my baking and hopefully get some feedback on my efforts. Rather than start by driveling on about how long I've been baking for etc. (plenty of time for that).  I think I'll get straight on to posting this mornings efforts.

I am happy to have found a bread that my wife and I agree upon. I prefer hearty flavors (that stand up to obscene amounts of toppings and sauce), whereas she prefers tender white breads. It's important to find this balance given that the bread I bake is the bread we're both stuck with until I bake a new batch.

Hello,

Over the past 2 weeks, I made several easter breads to share with family and friends, here they are...

- Tsoureki - Greek Easter Breads. No, I am not greek, and I didn't know of this bread until this year, but some of my running friends are, and I made this for our recent gathering.

 Greek Easter Bread

Makes one 2 ½ pound loaf

4 Tablespoons butter

2 heaping dessertspoons of honey

2 eggs

2 teaspoons dry yeast

1½ teaspoons salt (2 if using unsalted butter)

1 teaspoon anise extract

20 ounces (about 4 cups) unbleached white flour

1 1/3 cup water at room temperature

Hey All,

Just wanted to share with you some spelt sourdough batards that I baked last night.  I'll post the recipe a little later.  Enjoy!

Tim

Though it may sound weird, but it is a mega Batard, more like Batard a la Miche.

Ingredients:

200g Whole Rye Flour

600g Whole Wheat Flour (Half of which is bread flour)

200g White Bread Flour

200g All Purp

2 tablespoons fine Sea salt

2 Tablespoons Thym

100g starter (85% hydr) 

1/2 teaspoon inst. yeast (in the final dough)

All in all, it is 75% hydration dough, with wholewheat flours as Soaker, and White flours as Biga.