Blog posts

This is the style of empanada in the Ilocos region of northern Philippines. Living in a former Spanish colony; I've seen and tasted empanadas here close to the ones in Latin America, those with flaky crust filled with minced meat and potatoes and either baked or fried, just tweaked to the local palate but the people of Ilocos adapted the empanada like no other. The dough is made with rice flour filled with green unripe papaya, mung bean sprouts, longganisa (local garlic sausage), and a fresh egg then deep fried which makes it closer to a taco or spring roll.

I used Cook's Illustrated's ciabatta recipe with the following modifications:

I added two tablespoons of olive oil to the dough because I couldn't understand why it was left out of their recipe in the first place. Ciabatta without olive oil? Weird.  The biga rested at room temperature for 8 hours and then into the fridge for 12.

The bread came out pretty tasty. What do you think? How'd I do?

I have made a variety of sourdough breads with nuts and with nuts and dried fruits. For some examples, see:

San Francisco-style Sourdough Bread with Walnuts and Figs

San Francisco-style Sourdough Bread with Walnuts and Sour Cherries

I enjoyed these rolls so well, I made a second batch. The big change? I used 3 Tbs granulated onion rehydrated in 2C boiling water rather than 2Tbs onion. I have enjoyed these rolls for sandwiches as dinner rolls or just on their own with a schmear of butter. One of my favourite recipes from any source. Bless you Norm!

Happy baking, Ski

Bread is carbs and contrary to recent diet trends carbs, if they are whole grain and low glycemic are should not be avoided.  Anyway, even though all TFLs are carbo-fans, being bread -fans I am happy to share with you a bread I developed with the aim of making a reduced Gycemic bread.  I was also keen to make sure that this lower GI bread still maintains its identity as bread.  This lower GI bread, made from whole wheat and whole barley flour and enhanced with gluten and sunflower seeds is definitely a nice and tasty bread and definitely a lower GI bread.

I made a spelt loaf from 100% spelt including the starter.  I built the starter from an existing rye starter with an initial 4 g subsequently building to 100% hydration 100% spelt starter.  I then used 5g of that to build to the 165 g required for the formula.  I used the suggested formula that dragon posted in the thread "Spelt Starter" in October 2015. 

Lucy’s recent methods for spouted sourdough breads of 30-100% whole and sprouted flour have used the bran to feed a small amount of long retarded rye starter to make a 3 stage levain that is then retarded for 24 hours.

It always amazes me how much the acid in the levain bleaches out the flour color.

Still converting boule and batard formulae to baguettes.  This time it is Jefrey Hamelman's Pain au Levain with mixed SD starters.  I'd made this once before, when I first started doing batards and had just then recently created a rye starter.  And now its number came up to make some baguettes - and one batard (just for old time's sake).

Today I dedicate this bake to my eldest son, who suddenly collapsed and passed away 4 weeks ago today. My head is everything except okay but we could no longer accept store bought bread.  So I chose a simple loaf to start baking again (Forkish overnight white) but I have to say the pleasure I normally have is missing. 

crumb shot