Blog posts

Rusian rye bread 2 boules

Russian Rye Boule

Russian Rye Crumb

I posted a White Loaf a few days ago. I converted it from a commercial yeast loaf that I have been making for some time now. I haven't tried to ferment this recipe until today. I covered with plastic after the first rise (placed in loaf pans) and refrigerated overnight. I assumed that the sour flavor would be dominate after the retarding. After taking out the loaves and a 4 hour rise I baked them; I found the sourness still there but the bread was much sweeter than the ones I do in "a day". They also had a browner crust.

San Francisco Sourdough variation Boule

SF-SD-Variations-Boule Crumb

The Chocolate Cranberry loaf was my first 100% sourdough loaf. I won't say too much about it here, because I posted questions about it in another forum. Here is a link to that conversation.

This loaf was made using my yeasted starter. My wild starter still isn't ready yet, although today's observation (day 6) shows that it increased by about 50% - the most so far!

Well, I can't say that this blog will be interesting to anyone but me. I have a food blog, published to keep up with my favorite recipes and let my far-away friends and family know what cooking I'm up to. But, I'm the one of the only bread bakers among us, and since I'm just learning I'll have lots of comments (mostly to myself) and I need a place to write them down. So, I guess since I've got blog space over here, I might as well use it!

This was really fun to make. I decided to try something with a poolish today, and I'm so glad I picked focaccia!  But wow does this recipe make a lot.  Even though it took a while, the results are really worth it.  I've never made focaccia of any kind before, but this was way better than any store-bought stuff I've had in the past.  Here's the crumb:

This weekend I finally made a loaf of vollkornbrot, which I'd been planning to do for some time.  It was a lot of fun, and let me try several things that I had not done before: