Blog posts

My mission to practice making croissants continues. Fourth-time was indeed a charm. I was quite happy with the result and felt that I was on the right track. There could be a number of factors contributing to better outcomes this week.

 Easter as we know is shared and respected over most of the world. Last year I noticed  people were asking for recipies for Easter breads.

So I noted that for next year(being 2011) I would start a blog asking people of different nationalities to share their traditional easter bread from their homeland or even a recipe handed down through their families over the years that comes out as family treat at easter only.

Recently my husband announced that he needed to cut way back on salt in his diet, and after quizzing me about the bread I've been baking, determined that he needed to cut way back on my bread.   Given that he's my principal guinea pig (I mean recipient, I mean,... oh forget it)  I viewed this as a setback.   After some thought though I realized it was an opportunity.   And so ...  Tuscan bread.

This is my second experiment with using beer brewing methods to make a bread.

This time I wanted to see how the flovor of hops would taste in a baked loaf. 

barley flour soaker. Leave at room temp overnight.

Peter Reinhart calls for malt powder in several recipes in Crust and Crumb so I ordered some diastatic malt from Amazon.  Yesterday was the first time I've tried it.  The stuff tastes quite sweet.  I threw together some dough, doubling up on the yeast and malt percentages Reinhart might call for just for jollies.  The stuff rose higher and faster than anything I can recall!!!  It was surprising, almost spooky!

My wife and I are beginning to learn the techniques involved in baking bread. So many new terms to learn, so many steps to master. We appreciate this forum as the readers here have already helped us tremendously.

Our question now is the difference between starter and preferment. We were advised to use a preferment to create more flavor and possibly larger holes in our foccacia loaves. While reading about preferments we came across the term "starter" which we had heard before. We thought starter was only used in sourdough bread.