Blog posts

Starting a sourdough starter - Summary of internet research

Toast

Ive been looking into various recipes and explanations of creating a starter, and i thought id put a summary here.

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Pretty well all of the recipes include a replication step like "divide in two, disposing of one half, and adding back a particular ratio mixture as a replacement". A very few have slightly different steps in the first few days but end up with this process at the end.

Bread For All

Toast

Bread and all of its manifestations. That's what this blog is about. Particular emphasis is upon earth ovens, sourdough bread baking and flatbreads. Currently, I'm scouring the web and my book collection for photos of earth ovens from around the world. Whenever possible, I list my sources to give the photographer or agency credit for any photos used.
If you have photos of earth ovens and would like to share, please email them to me, and I'll try to put them on my blog.

Corn Flour Rolls

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  I baked these rolls using a recipe from a book published in 1918 and meant to help in the conservation of wheat flour. It has many interesting recipes using other grains such as corn, buckwheat, etc. and the recipes that I tried all turned out beautifully. These rolls contain a minimal amount of sugar and butter and taste great.I made them for bread baking day #12.

 

Ingredients

first bread from the earth oven

i fired up the mud oven on thursday, and had a hectic evening of trying to time everything correctly.

i made pizza, brussel sprouts with garlic, onions and breadcrumbs, sourdough rye, french bread, and roasted corn, sweet potatoes and garlic.

as you can see, i overproofed the french bread, but the sourdough came out perfect, with a great oven spring. i soaked my door a second time before the bread to increase the amout of steam in the oven, and it really seemed to work.

Wild Onion Rye Bread (wildyeast)

[center]wild rye bread © ejm July 2008[/center] Dark rye bread flavoured with onion and caraway seeds and made with wild yeast; based on a recipe by "Breadchick", one of the Bread Baking Babes (BBB) My starter is extremely active these days. I think that's one reason this bread turned out so incredibly well. When I started to make it, I was sort of sneaking around about it.

I've seen fire and I've felt pain...

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Lest anyone who reads my posts think I know what I'm doing, I've decided to post my latest adventure as an illustration to the contrary.

The story of how the tandoor got into my back yard is one for which the world is not prepared, but it is there, the weather is too hot to turn on the oven, and I thought to myself “Well, this is a good time to learn to make naan.”

The first step is getting the right tools.  After watching and watching the YouTube video of a chef making naan, I decided that the little tool seemed pretty handy.

Bubbles in bread

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I am interested in baking a rustic bread with huge holes or bubbles and a thick crisp crust - any recipes come to mind? I have tried several chabatta bread recipes which come close but I'm looking for larger bubbles.

The Italian Baker

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I found this interesting book in the library recently, The Italian Baker by Carol Field. It covers not only bread but cakes, pastries and cookies and gives both weights and volume. It also gives methods in three ways, by hand, by mixer and by processor but they are quite well separated and easy to follow. The author lists many sayings and proverbs that express the Italians' way of expressing their sentiments, using bread as their common metaphor.