Blog posts

A friend recently asked if I could try making some semolina loaves. He missed them after his vacation in Italy and sent me references to the Matera bread.

After reading a couple of posts here, I ventured on my first loaf.

First loaf - Complete failure

I started off with what seemed to be a standard recipe. 500g semola rimacinata, 100g 70% hydration starter, 350g water, 1.5% salt.

BF took 7 hours without dough degradation but also without much gluten development. I did a final proof of about an hour and then shaped it before putting it into the oven.

Invisible Cities: This ruled. Instantly a classic for me. So much there. Other than saying it's at least in someway about psychogeography, I'm not sure I can really say anything more.

Today's Bread: PDLarry's custard bun. Elements are there, but it needs another try, too much bursting and I definitely overproofed and underbaked them. The custard was delicious however.

I was jonesing for some rye bread and wanted it sooner rather than later, which ruled out taking time to refresh my starter and build a levain.  In leafing through The Rye Baker, I came across a Yogurt Rye bread that was leavened with yeast and thought "That looks interesting."  It's also a bread that I haven't made previously.  So I made it.

Touki Bouki: Varying from horrifying, beautiful, confusing, funny, and back to beautiful, this demands a rewatch, very powerful images

Nazi Literature in the Americas: Bolano sets up a perfect ending to the novel. The final chapter is a gut punch so unexpected and shocking that it recontextualises the rest of the book; no longer are the frightful entries merely abstract and historical encyclopedia entries but rather real personnages, real events, real suffering.

A while back I had made this Hamelman "Farmer's Bread" with yogurt, per his directions, and found it boring. But after a friend dropped off some home-made Quark cheese this week, I decided to give it another go since he mentioned he was recreating a quark bread from his days in germany. And it's really good!  A nice pain-au-levain type taste in only 4 hours start to finish.

This is a follow-up to Precaud's interesting post on enhancing oatiness. And my, what a journey. I love my oats, and have lots of experience making them for granola, incorporating a portion into my bread and so forth, but at a high percentage, oats do very funny things. 

I had a bread party in the office a few days ago and brought three breads:

Sourdough Bread with Spelt and T85 Flours

David M. Snyder

September, 2024

While I am very happy with the multigrain sourdough bread I have been making in recent years, I am still interested in trying new flour mixes. In this instance, I have been wanting to use some Central Milling T85 flour I ordered, prompted by Maurizio Leo’s fondness for this flour and inspired by his “Rustico” sourdough bread recipe in “The Perfect Loaf.”

With all of the discussion around biga on thefreshloaf lately, I thought I'd owe it to myself to faithfully make Abel's 90% biga bread which has become one of those famous recipes here. This time I tried to make it exactly as per the recipe. In the last month I've tried Rene's idea of a 50% biga with sourdough, and I've also tried a similar idea of a long 24 hour fermented biga made with sourdough at 90% biga.

I'm making three loaves for the office bread party next week, and in addition to the 40% rye and 60% spelt, I thought I will bring this...decadent loaf.