Blog posts

Another great one from Ginsberg. The walnuts go really well together in this bread. My only challenge was lack of coarse rye meal, which I used to get from Ginsberg's shop but he closed it since. However, I came up with a workable substitute: a 75/25 mix of rye chops and pumpernickel flour from Baker's Authority. Not exactly the same but this loaf came out very similar to the one I made when the coarse meal was still available. I do have a Mockmill and I'll investigate coarsely grinding the grain but have to go through what I still have first.

Banana cream pie. 100% from scratch.
Phase #1
The buttery short pastry (Pâte Brisée) 👍✔️

I ask my bride what desert she wanted next. I rather see her indulge in my homemade sweets, rather than store brought. 

31Jan

Made with fresh-milled Durum wheat and fresh-milled Spelt.

This bake used fresh milled flour, milled with my Mockmill 200. I sifted once with a #30 drum sieve and re-milled at the finest setting for the spelt and sifted twice for the durum using a #30 and #40 sieve. I find that for the durum, it’s important to sift twice and re-mill to make sure it’s very fine, or you end up with a dense crumb.

Friday night is pizza night at TFL! I promised to show a thick crust light as air focaccia type pizza. Here she is. Parbaked crust weeks ago and frozen for just such an occasion as a cold cold COLD Friday !

I thought I was done baking before my trip, but decided to bake a pizza to have tonight and tomorrow night.  These Roman style pizzas are what I’ve been enjoying making lately, The size and thickness of the crust is just right for the two of us to have over two meals.  I’ve been adding a tangzhong to the dough made up of 10% of the total flour, in this case whole spelt at 200% hydration.

I am enjoying, and getting better at creating aesthetically pleasing cakes.

Formula modified from Inside the Jewish Bakery 

So I was super-patient with the yeast water -- letting four organic apricots sit in water for six days till the liquid was bubbling. But I was super-impatient with the dough: a somewhat more wholegrain version of Hamelman's Swiss Farmhouse formula. (I changed the recipe to 70% bread flour/10% rye/10% spelt/10% malted khorosan because I figured that no self-respecting Swiss farmhouse baker would make a 90% white flour loaf. A white bread is a city bread.)

We will be traveling for a month and a half, we leave next week, so I haven’t been baking as much since we won’t be around to eat it all.  I did however, have some aquafaba from a bean and fish recipe I made so decided to see how well it would work for these crackers which I’m kind of addicted to lately.  You may recall that aquafaba is the water left over from a can of beans and it is very very useful as a vegan substitute for egg whites in many baked goods such as meringue.  

We're in Tenerife for a hiking vacation, and I chanced upon this bag of roasted corn and wheat flour in the supermarket. 

There are also versions with only corn, or a combination of corn and other grains, but I bought the 50/50 corn/white.