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Ginsberg's Home Jewish Bakery, or, How I Spent My Friday (and part of Thursday night)

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I'm on the Board of a local charitable organization, and last night (Oct 17), we had our annual gala, which includes a silent auction. As I do every year, I donated a bread basket (which, I'm happy to report, fetched a very good price).

Getting there was quite a challenge, since the basket, which was Jewish bakery themed this year, included a challah, a deli rye, a dozen bagels, a dozen bialys, a dozen onion rolls, and a Russian coffee cake -- six breads, six different formulas, one KA stand mixer and two GE electric home ovens.

Multigrain, Carrot Rolls, Erics Rye!

Here is some of my recent baking, two of the batches are from the SFBI book and both are really good like alla formulas from that book. The first batch pictured is the whole grain bread with sesame- ,sunflower- and flaxsseds and also some oats. This bread is a really tasty hearthy whole grain bread wich I think should be made a bit larger than the ones pictured, they are about 2-2½" across and weights 450g each as suggested in the book. I do however think that a 2# loaf of this bread baked for a bit longer in the oven whould be perfect for making hearthy sandwiches.

Pain de Beaucaire

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After a number of attempts and a good bit of reseach I think I am close to making a decent Pain de Beaucaire.  It's a challenge that's ranks right up there with the baguette.  This was my third attempt.  It's a really good loaf of bread and has very good flavor.  I will continue to experiment with this dough and the special technique required for cutting and shaping and also requires the use of bran flakes sandwiched between the two layers of dough, placed one on top of the other, in order to produce the open effect seen in the photo below, where the loaf appears to be s

First efforts

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This is my first try at a sandwich loaf. I have only made no-knead bread so far.

The recipe I'm using is White Bread - Variation 2 from BBA. I *meant* to make 1 loaf and so was halving the recipe in my mind, but realized I'd added the full amount of liquids accidently so I had more dough than I expected.

Hence, I tried 1 sandwich loaf, and then 3 long rolls, hoping those would be like a hoagie, and 1 round roll.

seed and grain bread

[center]seed and grain bread[/center] Our multigrain bread recipe has a fair amount of rye flour in it. I still haven't found reasonably priced rye flour so decided to replace the rye flour with wheat flour and some corn flour. This is the great thing about bread recipes. They are pretty forgiving and substitutions can be made fairly easily. The dough was somewhat slacker than it is when it's made with rye flour. But it still rose well. Ha.

bread packaging

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Most of us make more bread than we can eat.  And hey, why not when it's takes just as long to clean up after making 2 loaves as it does after making 4 loaves.  Anyway, for those of you who give away (or sell) your extras, these bags might be of interest.  I use them for our bakery packaging because they keep things crisp and allow me to package the loaves while they're still warm.  Plus, as you can see, they enable the customer to pick up the loaves and see them from top to bottom.   I print the labels on a single color laser printer (no smudging), which makes

Humility, discard bread

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I know very well not to place 2 loaves close to each other or they will "burst" on the adjacent sides. So why in the world did I line up 4 pans of discard bread across the oven shelf? They were almost touching, and yup, each one burst open. I had 4 cups of starter and made the dough a little softer than usual - and the crumb is light and tender. I also decided to bake them from cold and the bottom crusts are very dark  Hopefully the neighbors won't be too critical. My only excuse is a rotten cough and cold which must have affected my thinking, A.