Blog posts

This weekend was devoted to experimenting with fruit yeast, and a second go at an old favorite. While I was waiting for my apples to ferment, I was also nurturing a levain for David's famous San Joaquin Sourdough. My first trial at the San Joaquin had been okay, but fell short of David (dmsnyder)'s example, leaving room for improvement.

Butter didn't smoosh in my bag on the way to work. Quite handy I think!

Recently, i've been suffering from BDS between bakes, or when my bread reserve dwindles.

Should i feel OK with that? I don't know.. am i not getting a Life? Possibly, yet, I may just be another Home Baker. I can live with that ;)

What's itching me further is that i, like many, was diagnosed with a mild Lumbar disc hernisis, and therefore with no Bread on plan for the week end.

I'll be baking, nonetheless.

Alternate titles for this post: "Saturday, Sunday and Monday Baguettes", or "Why my wife thinks I'm crazy, but fortunately isn't sick of baguettes yet".

My Foundation Degree students were making their own breads using pre-ferments a couple of weeks ago.   Both a "Biga" and a "Poolish" were available for their use.   They made some very fine pizzas, and an assortment of flavoured breads.

Once they had weighed all their pre-ferments, I noticed there were some "leftovers".

Alto and sax , my white and rye starters, were outgrowing their containers since I have been feeding and not discarding . I did this on purpose as I need the discard for lots of other goodies. Here is the best yet. I have made this particular banana bread several times but this time I did a couple different things and it paid off.

Inspired by Franko and many others, here I am joining in finally with the baking in a pot theme. This dough went straight into  a hot enamel lined cast iron pot, no parchment, no oil and came out clean as a whistle....  plus I must mention Dr Fugawe's awesome home grown Oregon starter (Grapplestein) which has emigrated safely to the UK and raised this one for me! I still don't know how to get those pointy slash ends, maybe I should start the slashes higher up or not cut so deep?  Joanna @ Zeb Bakes

Went to Seattle to visit my parents for Thanksgiving, made cookies, muffins, 3 different kinds of breads, with no evidence since I forgot to bring my camera. Oh well, they tasted good though! Came home on Sunday and need some bread for this week's lunch, but my starters are sound asleep in the fridge. Made this quick 40% rye from Dan Lepard's "A handmade loaf" using dry yeast. The liquid in the formula is dill pickle juice, boosted by some extra fresh dill, the loaf was very flavorful.

Boy am I happy with this method!  Can’t wait to retry all the wonderfully tasty breads I’ve tried from here and books that I’ve liked but just couldn’t get that spring going.  This is a heavy cast iron DO and I’m small; but no problem at all getting this together.  I did a trial set up to see how it would go and everything balanced so perfectly.  When it was all pre-heated I think I lost less heat from the oven because it loaded (although a little crookedly) quicker than using the pot right side up.  All worked like a charm.

I searched for different traditional Stollen recipes, combined several parts from all of them to match my personal taste and then baked my first Stollen yesterday and finished them today. I've never done them before, so I don't know if they will be good. The Stollen are quite heavy; 1 kilogram each. But traditional Stollen are supposed to be rather dense, without a lot of air inside them. Now they need to "sweat" for about a week in order to create the typically moist and soft structure and a good flavour. At least that's the plan and I hope it will work.