Blog posts

I first started playing with sourdough breads a couple of years ago. Unfortunately they did not turn out well although I kept trying for almost a year. This I came across Dan Lepards site (and later this one) and bought his book. I followed his recipe for the levain and after four or five days realised that my previous efforts did not resemble the bubbling mass I now had. My first attempt at the White Loaf was not a success, but I think that was because the climate temperature was around 34 C and I tried to keep to his recipes suggested timings.

After used to having bread for breakfast, i was deprived of my usual breakfast treat when my exams came and my last loaf finished recently. This is what i have to do when i have lil time on my hands. A loaf prepared in 15 minutes!! ..lol Had to make a brown soda bread... too much Soda i think. Affected the taste..haha..or is it suppose to be like tht?..i dunno. The people in the place where i live only calls white fluffy, sweet - cake liked things as bread. They would term all my breads as alien...

I finally started to do the little trick of holding back a cup of flour out of the recipe and using it as I knead. The dough has a much better hydration. I am so used to cooking and baking very rapidly and always trying to organize for speed. Now its time to organize to achieve the bread's best potential. Slowly stepping it up to the next level. I also decided to hold off on my starter. I want to thoroughly understand yeast breads first from the ground up-literally. Flat breads first. Maybe somewhere down the road I'll build my Wood Fired Oven....but not too far!

Apart from the fact that most of us eat Peanut Butter on Bread. This has not much to do with Bread. A few months ago I made some Peanut Butter just to see how it would turn out. It was good so I made some more and gave sample to our Organic shop. They loved it and now I am having a job keeping up with the demand. It is sold in all 5 outlets of the Organic store. The bottle-neck is in peeling the peanuts. We did try using ready-peeled nuts but it was not the same.

Firefox users: click here if you want to download a Fresh Loaf search plug-in. On that page, you click on the title "The Fresh Loaf". It'll install a little search plug-in. Then you can go up to your search box and click on the logo to switch engines. The Fresh Loaf icon looks like this: The Fresh Loaf search always at your finger tips... what more could you ask for?!?

Its 10:26 AM and I have just finished Baking. I started at 04:30. Shortly my wife and I will be off to deliver our bread to an Organic Shop we bake for. Three years ago we started baking in a small shop. We had the idea of baking healthy wholegrain bread. Boy were we wrong. Mostly we just got complaints about how hard the bread was. I have to say that in Malaysia bread is very very very soft and fluffy.

I made Melon bread for the first time today using the recipe posted by minako. We loved them. I followed her directions with only I few adjustments. One adjustment I made was to put no egg in the bread dough and 1 whole egg in the cookie dough. I also didn't happen to have any pastry flour in the house, which I assume is what she meant by "soft flour", so I used all-purpose unbleached flour in both doughs. Here are the doughs when they were ready to shape.

I baked oodles of quick breads today. Pumpkin bread, scones, popovers, and this weird potato-apple pancake from Country Breads of the World, which I recently got from the library. A good book it seems so far. They all turned out well. The pancake kinda fell apart because I didn't use enough flour, but it tasted excellent.

Ahh...finally after more than a 2 week wait, it arrived. Peter Reinhart's bread baker's apprentice finally got to my doorstep. Got it from Amazon. Haven't went thru it thoroughly yet, but it certainly looks great, though i find adhering to some of the recipes difficult at times (as in measures). ;)

I just set a starter out last night. Made of raisin water and unbleached all purpose. Hopefully i'll manage to get some loaves outta it this time.. hehe.. This is the 2nd time i'm doing this. Earlier this year, when i knew very little about making bread, my starter looked fermented, but they didn't produce anything or make dough rise... Guess it's just some other bacteria, not wild yeast. I live in a tropical country. Hope it's ideal for wild yeast and not some other nasty microbiological impostors... Didn't use wholewheat flour.