Blog posts

I am leaving to Austria for two months, there will be no baking... Can't possibly imagine how it must feel: no kneading, no feeding your sourdough, no messing up in the kitchen. And my poor starter... I have just thrown it away in the bin, since none of my relatives seemed eager to look after it.

Anyway. I obviously could not leave my family without fresh bread, so I baked 5 loaves in just a couple of days: 2 pain au levain with whole-wheat, dark silesian rye,

rye with walnuts and

Every summer we're faced with the pleasant task of trying to figure out how to use all the fruit from our trees.  Most of the fruit gets ripe at the same time and it's not possible to eat it all fresh.  Right now the apricots, apriums (cross between apricot and plum), plums, and sour cherries are almost all ripe.  The fig tree, which usually has 2-3 crops per year, is also beginning to have some ripe fruit.  Carol doesn't like jams or jellies so that rules out one method of preserving them.  I like jam but I rarely eat toast, so I don't go through the

Catching up again.

Tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, olive oil and farfalle are all that is needed for this fresh pasta salad that you can prepare a day ahead. Great for a a July 4th cookout.

It can be fast and easy, or it can take a LITTLE MORE TIME.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/homemade-farfalle-pasta-salade-for-july-4th/

So , I finally have one I want to share in my first post!  I have only been baking steadily for a couple of months now, and since I successfully captured some wild yeasties, have been using them exclusively.  I have also tried to simplify things as much as possible, hence have tended to keep my sourdough starter roughly the same hydration as my final dough.  As I have a regular day job, but don't want to limit my baking to weekends, I have been working on a means of fitting my baking into a regular day's schedule, and have come up with a technique that seems to work for me (m

At the beginning of the year, when I was a complete novice, I went to the half price book store, in the hope of finding some inspiration and help.  I couldnt find anything specific in the cookery section, so I meandered off to the discount shelves in hope of finding a novel in order to utllise my time doing something other than filling my freezer with dough items.  I noticed one book had been replaced backwards.  Imagine my excitement as I pulled it out, to find the title was simply 'BREAD'.  Eureka!  I have since made and adapted (oh yes, I said adapted...my advent

This is a 50% wholewheat from "BREAD". I have finally achieved the color i wanted and the crumb texture i like. THis is a keeper.

To obtain the color, I have improvised enclosed steaming for this one:

Poultry roaster with lid. Under the roaster a stone, and in the roaster lid: a stone squeezed-in in such a way that it dented the lid, but remained in. This way, i can get heat from a stone on top of the loaf, and from under the loaf, all in an enclosed space to trap steam. IT Worked!

Here are the loaves:

Today I revisited my childhood. For the first time I baked Danish Tebirkes.
For many years my grandmother, aunt, two cousins and I would spend our summer holidays in Denmark. Every morning
one of us kids would bike to the grocery store to pick up freshly baked rolls for breakfast. My favorite were Tebirkes, buttery, croissant-like rolls, sprinkled with poppy seeds.

Continuing my experiments with Lahey bread...

I have wanted to take classes from SFBI for so long, but TX is not exactly close to SF, and my day job really gets in the way of scheduling. When I saw they started offering some weekend workshops, I jumped on the opportunity. And of course, I picked the baguette class, since that's my main obsession.