Blog posts

Just thought I'd post my first entry to introduce myself. My current baking projects include a selection of cookies which I am baking as gifts for my family, and several breads for Christmas. I plan to use the Blueberry Cream Cheese braid recipe from this site for my Christmas morning bread. Things I bake the most often are: homemade pizza crust, biscuits, and cloverleaf dinner rolls. I also like to make a couple of loaves of bread on the weekends. One of my baking struggles is sourdough bread.

Schiacatta with grapes. Used star-anise instead of anise.. Added a lil fennel seeds too. If a touch of Chiati was added, it'll be more remarkable. Nevertheless, a nice crisp bread. Best eaten fresh out of the oven. :)

I'm back from Texas. Afraid I didn't find the time to go bakery hunting. The closest thing to an artisan bakery I found was the Au Bon Pain sandwich shop in the DFW airport. I did get to try one of the cakes from Collin Street Bakery, their pecan apricot cake. I'm not a fruit cake fan, but I have to admit it was darn good. Glad to see that folks were able to help each other out here while I was out.

Hi all you busy bakers, I have been struggling for a while with just not getting that beautiful light open airy texture to my doughs. Its come close at time with Pizzas and flatbreads but no cigar yet. For some reason I just brought up baking breads with someone and they told me about using water that had been purified by reverse osmosis. Never to use just tap water. Recently I was at my wits end as I always proof the yeast first and saw very little activity after 10 min. everything was done up to par. Threw it out the batch 2x's. I opened a brand new yeast packet same result.

Since we had another half a pot of soup leftover for dinner, I tried the autolyse approach again today (see yesterday's post). Much better results this time. My dough was real basic again:

13 ounces bread flour 9 to 10 ounces water 2 teaspoons salt 1 heaping teaspoon active dry yeast (activated in 1 ounce of the water for 5 minutes).

I changed my technique a bit. I mixed the bread flour (all I had in the house) and 9 ounces of the water together in a bowl until the flour was all moist.

I, too, had a doughy disaster today. I was trying to make a simple French/Italian bread using both a poolish (a wet, yeasted, overnight pre-ferment) and an autolyse (a flour and water quick pre-ferment). The poolish was too wet, the autolyse too dry, and when I tried to mix them together I could not get the chunks of autolyse dough to combine with poolish. It ended up having the consistency of chicken and dumplings.

It's a dense and heavy loaf this time. Good for gluten-intolerent people i suppose, since it's 100% rye. I decided to use the last remaining half of a German bread-mix packet. It says Roggen Vollkorn, or wholegrain rye if i'm not mistaken. Just add water and yeast, mix and u're done!

Once in a while, my mind will conjure some crazy idea. I did an experiment today. I tried smoking bread... Here goes the experiment. Since i lacked time, i made a small lean dough with more yeast, from Whole wheat and all purpose. Dough rised and got punched down. Shaped into a rough naan. For the smoking device...i used a wok with a lid, lined with foil and the fuel was brown rice and green tea (for added frangrance). Could smoke chicken, pork or duck in that too. Once fully heated, my kitchen smelled like a Chinese pork roasting pit! haha...smoky and fragrant in a way.

Today I baked the baguettes with Pâte Fermenté and the Roasted Potato Bread from Hamelman's Bread book. The potato loaves are the round ones with the fendu style crease. I love how Hamelman gives advice on how one should shape hundreds of fendu style loaves, but very little advice for the home baker. Typical of him: great recipes, but he rarely bothers helping out the novices.

We had the buttermilk rolls on the Thanksgiving table. They were wonderful. I'm trying to finish our can of coffee as quickly as I can so that I can use it to try baking a Panettone. In the meantime, I'll probably bake another batch or two of stollen and some of my family's Christmas cookies. We going to visit family in Texas in a couple of weeks. Supposedly Texas is where fruit cake originated.