Blog posts

Hello Everyone:

   I live in a small town in VA, and on a yearly basis new books are purchase for the library.  I requested the Bread Baker's Apprentice( because of the high recommendation from this site) for the library since we have nothing remotely close to what being recommended on this site. I copied Floyd's book review and  gave the list to the librarian who has to submit to the committee.  Well, the verdict came two days ago!

This bread has two sources of inspiration. First is the basic sourdough formula from BBA, which is this week's recipe for the BBA challenge (yes, we are still hanging on, the end is near though); the other is the mexcali heat bread from the ever so helpful sourdough home website:http://www.sourdoughhome.com/chipotlebeanbread.html

As of late, I have been taken by the flavor of durum flour in my breads. Most often I make Susan's sourdough and use about 15% rye and 5% durum along with the bread flour. I had been using more than 5% of durum flour but got a bit carried away. The flavor enhancing effect turns into flavor dominating if you go above 10%.(imho) Less than 10%, it adds a slight buttery flavor and beautiful color to the crumb.

When you have a lot of time on your hands and want to test yourself....this a good bread to try. I originally saw this bread posted at Wild Yeast when Susan was having a giveaway for the SFBI book Advanced Bread and Pastry.

The Swiss have the reputation for being very punctual. Well, you might think now, that we're this time to early. But - you're mistaken.

The 6th of december is here Santa Claus' day, or as we say, "the Samichlaus comes". Sadly, the real Samichlaus doesn't come to our house anylonger as my siblings and me are considered to be too old by now. (Well, I understand, we're 22, 20 and 17 ...) But we still keep the rest of the custom up.

Just yesterday's bread...

100g starter (100% hyd.), 315g water, ~1/4 cup mixed sesame seeds, 9g salt, 1 tsp toasted sesame oil, 400g All Trumps high-gluten flour, 50g coarse whole wheat flour

Keep your dough close to 76F throughout mixing and fermentation.

I wanted to make this Cranberry Walnut Bread for Thanksgiving but the timing did not allow me to do so. This is basically the same bread as seen at Bread cetera  and a slightly different version at WildYeast. The bread went together with out any real hitches.

I thought I'd post the resluts from yesterday's baking and see if I can figure out how to post pictures, so here goes.  This is the French bread from Ed Wood's "Classic Sourdoughs"  I don't use this book as much as others in the library but the timetable of the formula worked with my Friday / Saturday schedule.  The crust is nice and crispy and I did get some nice fractured crackles as soon as they came out of the oven.  Oven spring wasn't quite as good as I'd like and as usual, the biggest challenge for me is getting a good score.  Enjoy.

I was re-reading Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery and discovered the passage in whiich she describes the author Virginia Woollf's technique for making a cottage loaf. That sounded like fun, so I decided to give it a try, and was very pleased with the outcome. I blogged about it here.

Here's the loaf just after removing the cloche.

And here it is after final browning.

I baked a couple boules of Susan from San Diego's "Original" favorite sourdough today.