Blog posts

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.

So life got busy, it got hot outside, and I got lazy about updating. Here's the last several weeks, roughly condensed into one blog post.

12 September, 2014

 One of the attractions of Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt Yeast bread baking book is that a concerted study of it will teach you how the important variables of ingredients, time and temperature can be manipulated to produce different flavor profiles and how, keeping most methods constant, you can develop procedures that accommodate to your own schedule and still produce a variety of outstanding breads.

Back in the UK, and it's great to be baking again.

I was pleased with the crumb on the classic sourdough I made today.  My husband liked the crust as well.

I just couldn't help myself. I really wanted to bake, so I decided to make some no-knead bread; something that would be doable during a school day, even if it meant using commercial yeast. I must say, I was quite happy with the results, and it made a delicious loaf to have for dinner. 

We were out of town for a few days and came back to a 100 year floods.  The normal rout we take to our house was closed so we had to go around and come in the back way.  The reason the road was flooded was the 5’ of rain we got in one day when we only get 7” a year.

Lately, when I give someone a loaf of bread, they hand me a bag of freshly picked apples in exchange.  Not one for standing over a hot stove making applesauce I have been transforming and preparing them for their next destination by baking them into my breads.

Hi all, yesterday we make our fruitcakes, so we would have plenty of time to snocker them up for the Christmas Dinner. We used a great recipe that we tested when Helen and I surprised Barbra on her birthday almost a whole year ago... we made our yearly fruitcakes there with her in October.  This year we started a bit earlier and baked together via cyber/text.  Admittedly, in person was more fun!!!  But these all came out great by anyone's standards I am sure.

Hello,

I’ve returned from our more than two months away from home and from our oven, but made good on a promise to a distant acquaintance.  I said that I would try to create a video of the making of the Bouabsa baguette for her, and I did.  As my first baking “project” since returning home.