Blog posts

In an effort to practice my shaping techniques I decided to make Pain de Campagne from Peter Reinharts The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I think I've got shaping loaves down (as in shape and stick in a pan where the pan does most of the work), and I'm on my way to perfecting boules but I haven't really tried any other shapes. This recipe seemed pretty straight forward since it's basically just salt, flour yeast and water. I made a preferment 3 days before mixing the final dough, and used 1.5oz Rye instead of whole wheat. The book says the recipe makes 3 loaves or multiple rolls.

Every time I venture to Whole Foods I manage to find something interesting to add to my bread baking and last weekend was no exception.  I was already planning on making bread with some fresh chopped cherries so when I saw some 100% Cherry Juice on the shelf I couldn't resist buying it and using it in place of most of the water.

I made an enormous ciabatta weighing nearly 1 kilo. I used an 18hr-fermented biga starter and a combination of medium and weak flours. This thing was massive!

Biga:
400g '00' flour from Shipton Mill
160g cold water
1.3g Instant yeast

Final dough:
Fermented biga
320g cold water
200g plain flour (9.4% protein)
24g Extra virgin olive oil
12g Non-diastatic malt powder
12g Salt
2g diastatic malt powder 

olive oil for S&f.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__FwAfWl1Cc&list=UUKhVduFt-2pU5O8XcRKKTIQ&index=1&feature=plcp

After the last white bread bake using the Pharaoh’s Mastaba, we went back to a 67% whole grain; rye and wheat bread with rye and wheat sprouts and a variety of add-ins and seeds including wheat germ, flax, coriander, pumpkin, hemp, rosemary, chia, cumin and red rye malt baked in another variation of the Chacon.

Recently my wife and I started camping. Neither of us had been camping since we were kids, and we were both a little iffy on the idea, but we got dragged into it by some friends so we decided we'd jump right in. Turns out it was a great idea, we had a ton of fun and met a lot of new people who are growing to become friends. We've been camping again since then. We just got back from a trip, actually. One thing I like doing for new friends is to bake them bread. This presented a problem with camping because I was without my oven. Still, I soldiered on.

Summer News.   My path in becoming a baker...

... goes through Powburn, Northumberland, England.

Given my flour delivery was put back a week, and the weather has done nothing except rain here in the UK, seemingly incessantly, and forever, my baking schedule has been somewhat interfered with.

Finally, success.  I watched Mark Strausman on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqJLExaX0yc and saw how he shapes the fully--and I mean fully to the point where the dough is blistering and nearly collapsing (thanks to Stan for that point)--proofed rolls and then baked them convection (450, 25 degress lower than conventional oven temp, preheated oven), two baking sheets (no stone), reversing the sheets midway.