Blog posts

I am still lacking consistency bake to bake.  One reason is that I’m only baking sourdough every 2 weeks on average, but this week got another bake in.  I’ve still been trying Maurizio’s Beginner Sourdough as that was the first one I started with and wanted to gain some confidence baking it.  Two weeks ago I made an error and added way too much water and the dough lacked structure, it tasted fine but it was a bit on the pancake side of things.  This week I decided to hold back 20 g of water during autolyse, so rather than 78% hydration the bread would be 74%.

Here in Indy, I'm part of a very informal "buyers club" of Country Life Natural Foods, www.clnf.org, that gets free shipping on large group orders.  When you buy 25 or 50 pound bags of grain, the savings on shipping is significant.

I buy mainly Prairie Gold and Kamut wheat berries. But they also have bulk grains and flour of many varieties, seeds, cereals, and just all sorts of "baking stuff" (foods mainly, but a tiny  bit of supply/gear stuff.)  Organic and non-organic. 5 pounds to 50 pound bags.

It has been a long time since Lucy made some real old time SD bagels of any kind and she has never made and used a 7 day, old dough leaven to make them rise.  She wanted to do a regular levain but what kind of fun would that be?

I've been meaning to make panettone for quite some time.  The other day someone posted a link to Joe Pastry (https://joepastry.com/).  He stopped contributing to the site some time ago but the site is still active.  I love his approach and I was looking for a recipe that didn't require days on end of starter building.  The recipe follows BBA with minor tweaks.

 This week we have two brightly coloured loaves: one yellow and one purple.

30% Sprouted Kamut & Rye Sourdough

Just wanted to share this attempt to bake a traditional bread from France.

From the book "Pains des boulangers" by Mouette Barboff.

Happy Fall Season to all!

I'd been warehousing Abel Sierra's post of pan de cristal for forever.  But no more.  My first attempt 2 days ago taught me a few things about a few things, and the results, while okay, were tasty but nothing more to write home about nor to write up on TFL.  And so I made what turned out to likely be the corrections necessary.

Well a year and a half into my pie baking “career” I’ve finally made my first apple pie.  I know a lot of people love apple pie, but I hate peeling apples and have no space for a dedicated apple peeler in my apartment kitchen.  However, this apple pie turned out so well I might have to make room.

I followed the Bravetart Apple Pie recipe almost exactly and overall it turned out well.  I used once again the all butter crust recipe from Bravetart however, this time I subbed 40 g of the water for 40 g of vodka to see if it would make the pastry a touch more tender.