Blog posts

Dude, where's my bread?! Quite a few people have asked me whether my 36 hour soudough baguette dough can be used for other breads, of coure! The most natural vaiation is of course ciabatta, another hole-y bread. I again used a mixture of rye starter and white starter (something about this combo makes the flavor better), and raised the hydration to 85% (10% rye in the dough, so it's probably similar to a 82% hydration white dough).

AP flour, 425g

I used Hamelman's formula for this classic Vermont Sourdough. Used Heartland Orgranic flours that I found at Whole Foods. Dough was hand-kneaded and retarded overnight. Baked on 2 inch firebrick and covered with aluminum roasting pans ($1 at Dollor store) for first 20 mins of baking. Sorry there is no crumb shot, but trust me that it was as soft as a pillow! I attribute my success to the gentle kneading, organic flour, and aluminum covers. Enjoy!

This is yesterday's bake, a sourdough rye from Hamelman's "bread". I used dover farm organic whole rye flour, and sifted it to obtain something near to medium rye flour called for in the recipe. I followed Hamelman's instructions to the word, including the addition of yeast to the final dough. i have baked higher ryes before, so i was pretty comfortable with handeling the dough. This recipe is very easy to understand and bake, as opposed to other higher percentage ryes in hamelman's book. I used 12.9% protein strong bread flour from waitrose.

I was still trying to use up the coconut that was approaching its use-by date. Apart from making Cherry Ripe macarson the other week, I was thinking about coconut bread.

Trying to replicate the coconut bread from an Asian bakery that we love (it's buttery bread with random moist coconut filling throughout), I was thinking about making the bread into babka-shape with the coconut butter filling. I also made half of the batch into coconut rolls baked in a muffin pan.

my starter (affectionately named "dr.

I made Essential's Columbia from my recent purchase Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking Across America.  I liked the way it turned out and tasted with A/P, W/W, Rye, Wheat Germ. 

Still working on posting!

Greetings, bakers,

My wife's christmas present was a baking course at the Lighthouse Bakery, a small bakery focussing on teaching and some wholesale.

We were 4 participants and made some wonderful breads out of 5 different doughs using biga, rye sourdough, sponge, poolish and pate fermentee.

The most surprising and spectacular of the breads we made was the pugliese, which is also the "signature" loaf of the Lighthouse Bakery.

Liz and Rachel, who run the bakery, are happy for the formula to be shared, so here it is: