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Mediocre loaf

Profile picture for user Floydm
I made a couple of mediocre loaves of my daily bread today. Too little salt? Something wasn't spot on. We ended up using much of it as dunkers for a batch of white trash chili cheese fondue tonight. Sunday we hit Winco, a warehouse grocery store kind of like Food 4 Less. They had Saf Yeast for 2.50 a pound! I couldn't believe it: I usually pay 4 times that for 4 ounces at the local grocery store. Needless to say, I picked some up.

This weekends results

Toast
I was originally going to try the Italian bread from BBA this weekend, but I forgot to write down the biga recipe so I had to scrap that idea. So instead I decided to come here and look up something else to try. The victim of my baking experiment would end up being Floyd's daily bread recipe. As other people did, I found the dough to be extremely wet. I had to add another 1/2 cup of flour for the dough to come together. It was still very slack, but I could still work it.

Oven fixed; baking ensues

Profile picture for user JMonkey
A big baking weekend, now that my oven is fixed:
  • Nice and sour 100% whole wheat sandwich bread
  • Pain au levain (actually, Jeffrey Hammelman's Vermont Sourdough, but I live in Watertown, MA, so technically, I suppose it should be "Watertown Sourdough")
  • Baguettes (using the BBA's French bread formula which employs a pate fermente)
  • Whole wheat sourdough with raisins, pecans and a cinnamon sugar swirl.
  • Hi, my name's Joe, and I'm a bakoholic.

    Profile picture for user Joe Fisher
    There's pecan craisin and sourdough rye and pumpernickel breads on the top of my fridge. Banana bread on my counter. Sourdough craisin dinner rolls, herb rye, pumpernickel and pizza dough fill my freezer. 25 lb buckets of flour fill my basement. Sourdough starters crowd my fridge. My in-laws have threatened my life for making them fat with breads they can't resist. It's a terrible addiction :) -Joe

    Oven on the fritz in the swamp called New England

    Profile picture for user JMonkey
    It's been raining for two weeks, and we're about to get yet another week of rain. Luckily, I'm not in any danger of getting flooded out, but I may end up working from home at the rate they're closing roads. Very wet. And at the rate that sewage and water treatment plants are going offline, I may end up boiling all our water soon. My oven will be repaired on Friday, but it still works well enough for me to keep a fairly constant 350 degrees -- good enough for the BBA's raisin-walnut (I prefer pecan, being a former Southern boy, myself) bread.