Blog posts

I'm taking another stab at that rye with onions.  I have the dough made and in the 'fridge.  I'm a little concerned that it is wetter than I'm used to and I'm not sure how much influence the onions and olive oil have on the hydration of the dough.  I added an extra 8% or so of flour to my normal 70% hydration formula, but I'm worried about the wetness.  I'm going to try baking one as a boule from a form.  I haven't done that in a long time.  I've been doing exclusively the baguette shaping technique for quite a while now.  It will be a challenge with dough

In many recipes I am reading the amount of butter neeeded is measured in tablespoon , cup , half stick etc but unfortunately I have in the refrigerator a big chunk of butter that is not in easy stick ready to be divide , my question is how translate this measure in ounces or grams and do any difference in the recipe, are any specific conversion table for butter ?

        Thanks for the help , Marco

I wish to keep the crumbs on my crumb cake or buns SOFT. (Like Entenmans does). How can I keep the crumbs from getting hard and crunchy? Thank you

A few weeks ago I saw a post with a reference to a Honey Lemon Whole Wheat loaf. As I recall a couple posters had commented that this bread was high on the best breads list for them. A fellow I have high regard for (PMcCool), suggested I would like it, so I decided to give it a spin.

I bake bread at least twice a week plus the cookies and quick breads that are the treats around here, but I just haven't had the time to post.  That combined with the fact that most of my bread baking is about getting sandwiches made that my kids will eat!  Panned loaves didn't seem interesting enough for me to keep track of, but hey, I'm baking like crazy and sometimes I like to look back and see the results of all the work.  Too bad I didn't get a shot of the eight loaves of challah last week.

I haven't been taking pics lately but have been baking as usual. Wanted to thank David and also document how wonderful this formula is. I have a starter , thanks to Gaarp, that doubles in one hour. I take it out of the fridge 1x a week and feed it q 12h for a total of 2 times and it is fantastic. I also have a rye starter and a bowl of "discard". The San Joaquin is great. Here are pics. Perfect sour for us as we are not wild about lots of sour. I have found that my starter is very happy in the fridge. At least it works for me.

Baker Beware!

I'm making a blog entry to document my experience with Leader's Corn-Rye Rounds from Local Breads. The recipe was simple enough and the little rounds seemed to turn out as described by the recipe, but they tasted just awful. I was so disappointed that I didn't even take a picture of these little round rock-like things with a very odd and inharmonious taste of corn and rye. I threw them all in the trash.

--Pamela

I have finally developed a great formula for a naturally leavened sourdough. They are slow rising, but they come up very nicely. The problem is that when I slash them, they deflate. I tried to make a more shallow slash, but then I don't get a nice looking slash after final baking. Maybe I am proofing too long I guess, but I don;t get the nice open holed texture I like if I don't proof it to that point. I am using a very sharp lame each time so I know that isnt the problem either. Any ideas?

chefryan

"Cheese Bread" is a rather drab description of this strongly flavored bread, so I decided to give it the name of the cheese I used.  

The overall formula (which includes a stiff levain) is:

Bread flour - 100%

Water - 60%

Olive oil -  5%

Salt -  1.5%

Yeast -  1% (or half that amount if you plan to retard the bread overnight)

Parmesan cheese -  20%