Blog posts

Wine, Bread, and Cheese Podcast

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Sylvia Burgos has a podcast dedicated to artisan bread, cheese, and wine. In the latest episode she chats with Peter Reinhart and yours truly. Listen here. And, yes, I know I got the hydration backward. "100% flour, 65% water" it should be. I was tired. Gotta go heat my oven for today's baking.

I have a new toy. :)

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Hubby and I discussed the pros and cons of a dough mixer.

The pros won and I now own a kitchen aid artisan miser! We took a 5 year warranty out on it just in case, so now, I am going to go mad this week playing with it!

YAY!

 

 

sourdough pancakes

Toast
I have been trying to locate the pancake recipe that I copied down recently and used this morning. My grandaughters were here overnight and now expect pancakes as part of the deal. I set the starter, flour and water on the counter overnight, then discarded 1/2 cup and added the rest of the ingredients.I ended up with crepe batter! It started out thick enough but by the time everything was mixed in it was way too liquid. The girls didn't seem to mind and ate a goodly quantity ( and they are both petite, no fair!) but I wonder what went wrong?

Some Experimentation.

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So I decided that after maintaining my starter for almost a year now and being pretty satisfied with it, that I was confused about what I was doing. I've read so many different refreshment ratios for starters that it made me doubt my own, so I split it up to try a new one. Usually I do a 2:1:1 (starter:flour:water) to double it. By the way my starter takes on slightly different forms from time to time. For no particular reason other than I haven't developed a favorite I'll either feed it wheat flour, clear flour or bread flour.

Pizzies Pierre-nuries 9 story

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How I went about it...

I made Leader's Pierre-nury rustic rye dough. I like the dough so much, I'm experimenting again, well....

After following all the directions, carefully laid out the dough before me. I had just prepared all my ingredients:

toppings: Garden rocket, dried tomato pesto, leeks, pimento, ripe olives, cheese stuffed mushrooms

Smackdown! Fresh vs Aged Home Milled Flour

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Since the discussion continues on aging flour, this week I had the opportunity to mill and bake all in one day and I thought I would document the results.

I used the milling routine from my former post, but added two “medium coarse” passes prior to removing the bran. Immediately after milling I made the dough using the same method as my prior loaf. I really attempted to go “by the numbers” – number of strokes, dough temperature, fermentation time and temperature, and proofing time and temperature so the only difference would be between aging and not aging the flour.