Blog posts

You know your in a drought when it feels strange to have rain up here in Northern California where it usually rains nearly half the year.  Some can't handle it but I've come to love it.  I get to live just minutes from a variety of beautiful beaches, have a Redwood Forest for a backyard, and an amazing marsh that draws a ridiculous variety of bird life.  Not to mention just an hour from beautiful rivers and mountains going the other direction.  Finally it rained yesterday.

Here are some relevant and not so relevant past bakes and things.

Multi-Grain Levain with many, many seeds.

Some healthy buttermilk spelt flour pancakes with fresh blueberry maple syrup.

I wanted to make some sandwich rolls using my SD starter instead of yeast like I have been doing recently.  I also wanted them to be soft and fluffy so I used a Tangzhong method as well as Caputo 00 style flour and Durum.  Naturally some butter and ricotta cheese needed to be added because they usually make a good addition to any roll recipe in my opinion :).

Last Saturday, I was fortunate enough to create this loaf. She was stunning! And tasted awesome too! Here is what I did:

250 gr white flour 
200 gr of whole wheat flour 
50 gr rye flour 
11 gr salt 
50 gr mixed nuts (no walnuts) 
50 gr raisins 

Last week marked the return of ARTE Dubai, following a summer break in August. A week earlier, I’ve baked three breads  in 3 days. The first was Rye Sourdough with multigrain, and then a new recipe of mine: Date sesame bread, and finally the all too popular: Roasted garlic bread from Hamelman's book :BREAD. As expected, the garlic bread sold out in 3 hours,  while the date sesame came in second, and finally the Rye multigrain; the word rye multigrain may have mislead many visitors into thinking that the bread is hefty and dense , whereas it has only 20%  rye.

Any body else using a SF sourdo starter? I bought the SF started from Ed Wood at Sourdo.com.

A SF starter- to me - has the potential for a beguling sweetness lurking in the middle of a complex mmmmm.

Been making bread for about 8 months now, with good flavor and oven spring.

Acidity levels turn out more variable than I'd like, but don't gyrate wildly ...

I use a proof box (home built) to stabilize the starter temperature (I'm currently liking 73 degrees).

A no knead method is working well, and is quite simple to accomplish. No autolyese (yet).

So I was browsing through one of my books looking for something new to make and the Tomato Sourdough looked interesting.  I'd seen it before along with a beetroot sourdough but always glossed over them thinking them to be somewhat quirky and simply strange for the sake of being strange.  How wrong was I ?!

Been baking from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt & Yeast, and I decided it was time to keep better notes of what I was doing so that I know how to consistently get the bread I love.  

Let me start off for the record saying that while this bread is fantastic, I won't be following these procedures again, unless I can't get an equally great bread doing things correctly...

My friend's birthday is tomorrow, so I figured I should bake something that I knew would turn out well, and that I had some experience with. The Tartine basic country loaf seemed perfect. So I baked.