Blog posts

Over the past three or four weeks I've been experimenting with small adjustments, one at a time, to my process. Three of them appear to be adding positive nuances to my loaves. They are:

• longer autolyse, prior to adding yeast (or levain) and salt.

• using  new steam-generating containers.

• warming retarded, pre-shaped dough, and final proofing at elevated temperature: 82°F

I'm not dead, I've just been hiding from the temptations of the current ITJB items...

Plus, I haven't done anything interesting other than my usual weekly sourdoughs that we live off of, with maybe the following exceptions:

I made a bunch of marbled, braided loaves for people that I didn't get pictures of. At the end, I had a handful of strands left over and I was tired of braiding, so I shoved them into a lidless pullman pan...

My first post!  I keep my bread notes in a cheap notebook stuck to my fridge, but thought a bread blog might work better, and enable me to share my notes.  I am fairly new to bread baking and find some of the posts here rather intimidating.  I took an artisan bread baking course at our local technical college last fall, developed a wild yeast starter during the class, and was off and running with the longer-fermentation methods.  Before the class I had been making all our bread, but  just plain whole wheat sandwich loaves from my own flour, mixed and kneaded and bak

Hamelman's Pain au Levain

 Reinhart's Pain au Levain

Today is my wife's birthday.  Who wouldn't want a chocolate crusted orange flavored cheese cake with an orange flavored; chocolate ganache, truffles and chocolate shavings for toppings?  Home made aranchello makes this a special birthday cake.

Many folks are putting cheese in theitr bread.  Why?  Because all bread including Cheese Bread tastes good.  Especially, if you put bacon in it.  Fresh cheese making is easy, way easier than making bread.  Here is how.

Fresh Cheese

 Ingredients

You know those drying butt-ends of sourdough bread from the previous bake that you leave sitting in a bag, in danger of being forgotten until it's too late? I hate wasting bread, so am always on the lookout for ways to use those leftover bits.

Cubed leftover bread makes great croutons, and of course you can keep yourself in good supply of bread crumbs using a food processor. I keep a bag of frozen bread crumbs in the freezer door, which I often top up.