Blog posts

This past weekend I made French Bread I, using instant yeast and overnight retardation, following Reinhart's recipe in Crust and Crumb. I ended up with 3 loaves and baked them in our mud oven (traditional for Cyprus). I kneaded the dough as described in the book to disperse the ingredients, form the gluten and hydate/ferment. I should admit, when I performed the windowpane test, I had difficulty forming it. So, I continued kneading an extra 5 - 8 minutes...

I've attempted a cinnamon swirl bread with a little less than 1/2 the amount of yeast called for in the recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/blog/bnb.

So, I thought I'd push the limit a little more. The hokkaido milky loaf was a recipe I was very interested in. The entire recipe calls for almost 2 pounds of ingredients with the flour contributed more 50% of the weight. I reduced the yeast to a scant 1/3 of the amount called for in the recipe, so probably around 2.5 to 3 oz

 Panne Siciliano

Panne Siciliano - crumb

I found the flavour and texture to be better the next day (and not in the 2 hours after baking), and there was a little sourness. Is the durum flour meant to be sour? (My "sourdough" is not really sour and it's not previously imparted any sourness to breads).

This was something of an unusual weekend in bread-baking for me in that I made two recipes that were fairly experimental.  I just posted my experience with this week's sandwich bread, a 100% sprouted wheat bread.  My dinner bread this week was the German Sourdough Rye recipe from Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book.  I had not originally planned to make this, but got both whole wheat and rye sourdough starters going this past week and just couldn't resist trying one out.  I was leaning toward this recipe for my first attempt, and

Almost every weekend, I make one loaf of what I think of as "sandwich bread".  As you might expect from this nomenclature, this is the loaf that I'll be using for sandwiches in the coming week.  I generally pick recipes that are reliable, fairly plain, and light enough to make a good sandwich (admittedly, I like dense breads, so I might be less strict about this last criterion than many of you).  My more experimental recipes, or those including fruit or nuts or lots of herbs or other goodies, or those that are just extremely dense, fall under what I think of as my "dinner bre

Since it’s been spring I’ve been back in my springtime habit of sprouting things. I get all into it and sprout anything I can get a sprout out of and then I just eat them in or on everything. They’re just wonderful. This got me thinking about sprouted grain in bread, which is something that has crossed my mind more than once in the past, but I’ve never done.

I thought it would be interesting to compare four different approaches to sourdough fermentation. I've baked four test loaves, each with 500 grams total flour (using a 50/50 blend of Heartland Mill Strong Bread Flour and Heartland Mill Golden Buffalo for a blended ash content around .85%), 72% overall hydration, and 2% salt. All loaves started with 18 grams 80% hydration white flour storage starter.