Blog posts

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.

I've been away from The Loaf for awhile and I thought I'd post an update to my bread-state.

I'm rather fond of challah, but my wife isn't. Most challah is too rich and too sweet for her taste. The closer to brioche it tastes, the less she likes it. So, when I made “My Sourdough Challah” from Maggie Glezer's “A Blessing of Bread,” and both my wife and I loved it, I was delighted.

Wednesday my sister bought a rye loaf at the town market. I remember when I spoke with the guy and asked him more about this bread: this is a true rye they buy from Austria, the frozen dough is baked it in their oven.