Blog posts

Did you ever try the recipe for White Vienna Loaf from Waltrose Illustrated?  Your entry from a year ago fascinates me.

Thanks. 

With living in a humid and hot country, I find my desire to bake dwindles when the hot weather is upon us.

Here, in southern mexico, by mid february, we are into the high 90's usually. In march ,105 F is usual. Kitchens are traditionally not air conditioned, as that is where the maid works. (Read "me" for maid when it comes to baking and cooking)

I was inspired by Jane and Srishti and the other folks trying whole wheat sourdough (thanks!), so I tried it. I started with the proportions I found here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/2059/100-whole-wheat-bread#comment-7919

Simple rye/honey/water starter.  This one came out SUPER soft...incredibley soft.  I absolutely am in love with the texture.  It's kind of a mixture of all sorts of flours since I had a tons of small amounts left.  I had some organic gold&white from my co-op, KA AP, KA bread flour, and rye from my coop, and a stone ground white from a water mill a couple towns over.  Yea...5 kinds of flour in this bread.  It's wonderful!

I've been real busy the past few weeks so have not been online much, but did make time to bake each weekend.

I really like the Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire or Struan from the BBA and have been modifying since I first made it with the hope of using sourdough as the main leavening, since Struan is an old Scottish bread I thought it would be good to have it all sourdough.

So with my Spelt starter in hand I changed the recipe once again:

My soaker was:

Woo! Hoo!

Referring back to my blog about not being able to make my bread rise..........well, it rose!

I adapted a recipe from BBA. I have been wanting to make Pane Siciliano but time wasnt permitting so I used the Anadama Bread recipe but didnt use the soker. I added 1 cup of fine semolina,

1 cup gluten flour and 2 1/2 cups of wholewheat flour (wholemeal) 2 teaspoons of yeast, salt, 2 TBSPN Barley Malt and about 2 1/2 cups of water.

I did this as I didnt have time to do the soker over night then then let the shaped dough rise in the fridge etc.

I ran myself right out of bread flour today :)

First we have some poppyseed "bloomers." Last time I followed the recipe to make one loaf and it was gigantic! This time I broke it in two.

To bring to dinner at my brother's house today, I made a pile of grissini. These are super easy to make and very tasty, what with the extra virgin olive oil and rosemary in them.