Blog posts

I almost forgot it was World Bread Day! But, my weekend baking actually applies pretty well to the holiday.

Last week I had 11 people over for dinner to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving..Food becomes a focal point for most ex pats (living outside their birth country). My ex chiropractor for example, would get misty eyes when he spoke about his mothers roast duck...in France.

After last weeks failures of french bread...and the previous weeks sourdough fiasco, I have decided to move onto something that is tried and true in the kitchen. The thought was to check the oven's ability to remain at a constant temperature since they moved the gas tank and laid new lines on the roof.

It's been a long week already, and it's only Thursday! I actually did bake last weekend, but am only now getting around to posting about it.

For my birthday, my mother bought me the brand-new King Arthur Flour Whole Grains Baking book. It's well timed.

I made a simple French Bread yesterday. I didn't use a pre-ferment or anything: I actually wanted to experiment with long knead times and see just how much of a difference in taste and volume it made. Something just didn't see right with my dough. It felt tight and, although moist, kind of puckered up.

After I tasted it it was obvious what was wrong: I added much too much salt.  Almost double.  The crumb still wasn't too bad:

I baked a couple loaves of French Bread and a Whole Wheat Loaf today: 

The French Bread turned out very good.  I used a poolish and autolyse, then when I went out for a hike this morning I popped the dough in the fridge so it had an extra slow, long rise. It always seems to help.

We're leaving town today to visit our youngest daughter and son-in-law for their birthdays.  One of the requests was "Could Dad bring some bread?"  So Dad got busy and baked some sourdough bread from the King Arthur cookbook.  I tweaked the recipe by substituting 2 cups of rye for some of the AP flour.  I also made a batch of sourdough english muffins as well.  Picture below: