Blog posts

One downside to working as a baker is that it doesn't allow me time to bake during the week.  So now everything gets crammed into weekends.  And frankly, sometimes after a week at the bakery, I really don't feel like spending a day off baking more.  And yet, inevitably I find my two starters staring at me ruefully, and so on a beautiful Fall day when the temperatures felt more like September than mid-November, I decided to do a series of bakes.

I am rather new at making homemade bread but it is something I am growing to love.  I come from a family of cooks and bakers, mostly from my mom's side of the family.  Her father was an excellent cook and baker; I recently stumbled upon one of his bread recipes for buttermilk loaf bread.  I have been making this loaf on the weekends for the past year or so.  However, he kept the majority of his recipes in his head and didn't write many of them down.  This has forced me to branch out on my own.

Hello, I have a group of people at work I wanted to bake bread for. I wanted to make them something special - this bread seemed to fit the bill!
It was such a pretty bread, as pictured in Advanced Bread and Pastry. With thanks to Mr. Michel Suas for a wonderful, if involved, formula - there are four separate preferments and I had to create a spreadsheet in order to figure out how to scale enough ingredients for 2000g of dough.
I divided into roughly 250g pieces to create as many loaves as I wanted to give (with one extra to keep, for tasting!). 

Tre mesi dal mio ultimo post, ma continuo a panificare. Oggi scrivo per aggiornarvi sull'andamento dei lavori per il nuovo forno a legna di Cascina Favaglie. Il forno è a buon punto, resta da terminare la canna fumaria, il tetto e la struttura frontale.

Three months since my last post, but I'm still baking bread. Today I write to update you about the construction of the new wood fire oven at Cascina Favaglie. The oven it's almost ok, we need to finish the flue, the roof and front structure.

I had to get this out of my system. I am an admirer of the bakery and the bread and I was glad to be able to take a shot at it. I agree with a lot of what's been said on both sides of the conversation about the book. I'm sure I will read and enjoy it more than I will use it to bake from. For a bakery book of that latter sort, as I've mentioned elsewhere, I still prefer Nancy Silverton. Anyway, I add my pictures for the record. I liked the pictures in the book of the loaves torn open, so I include one of those.

Because there are hardly any bread baking videos out there in Dutch, I decided to do it myself; this loaf is way too good to be only made in English!

Hello, I made a batch of Mr. Hamelman's Oatmeal Bread to make some bread today, so I could use my new bannetons!

My sweet little niece is turning 6. I wanted to make a bread design to go with her 6th birthday card, to form part of her gift for her birthday party tomorrow. This is 220g dough, 5" round banneton, and a small bit of Mr. Hamelman's pate morte colored with cinnamon to make the "happy face":

A few days ago our son announced he had bought a scale, and he needed a straight dough formula for non-sourdough (his preference) "french bread".  He has been baking "French Style Bread" from "Beard on Bread" for a couple of years, and he wanted a weight-based formula for a similar bread.  I gave him some tips on how he could convert his cups-and-teaspoons formula to weights by baking to volume and weighing everything, and I also gave him the flour/water/salt/yeast basic formula for a 65% hydration straight dough bread for a loaf of about 850 grams.  I have not heard back fro

This is apx. 82% (the recipe 3 X's is apx. 84%) total hydration dough, that I think would be fun for anyone to try.  It is one of my favorites, I've posted HERE before.  The recipe comes from Rose Levy Beranbaum 'the bread bible' and a photo is displayed on the cover.