Blog posts

Technically this isn't bread. I've had it on my bucket list for the longest time. This is where it comes from: https://www.mynewroots.org/site/2013/02/the-life-changing-loaf-of-bread/. It's simple to make. For my taste buds I would have added a bit more salt. I'm glad I tried it, might make it again, would be great to slice and put in the oven to make crisps, but don't know this will go into regular rotation. Enjoy if you try it..

My family loves my sourdoughs...despite the fact that I tear them all apart...but I decided to be nice to them today and make some enriched and flavored doughs. I am having so much fun and so many questions about this or that that I could crank out 10 experimental loaves a day but alas...one must show some control. Just not much!

Breakfast- Raspberry Cream Cheese Braid

Admittedly, it doesn't look like much, but there is a story to this.

After baking >10 loaves of cheese bread in a row, I decided to take a break from it and whip up a simple dough instead. This dough contained nothing but water, whole wheat flour and salt. Ok, there were also walnuts but they weren’t part of the “dough”. Although the dough was well developed, I accidentally let it over-proof for quite a bit… Uh oh… Yet thanks to this, I now feel more confident about rescuing over-proofed dough.

From the number of recent postings about sourdough starters, it appears that many have taken up bread baking.  This seemed a good opportunity to illustrate various steps during my preparation of Country Rye from the Tartine book.  I always benefit from seeing what something is supposed to look like, which is why I have included so many photos.

I've made Abel's 90% Biga loaf several times since he published it and in my view it's a TFL classic. However, although I've had great results with the yeasted version, I've never had success with the sourdough one.

I don't have pictures of everything- but I've been baking (a lot) and wanted to do a side by side comparison of Reinhart's Crust and Crumb San Francisco sourdough versus King Arthur Flour's no knead sourdough. I last made both at different times and with different skill levels. Time for a show down on even playing ground.

The contenders: Reinhart Crust & Crumb San Francisco Sourdough

Same bread made with CLAS, but using a different flour. 

I'd been a loyal customer of another brand of flour for over a decade, but I felt being ditched during this time when flour is so difficult to source.  So, I "deflected".  Maybe it's about time to change, and I love the new flour!

After my success with Hamelman’s 50% whole-wheat (Hello and thankyou everyone for your contributions) I tried adapting his procedure to use 100% whole-wheat, which has always been my favourite. I used 78% hydration to get a nice shaggy dough and found that using a hand whisk followed by manual kneading was much better than using my Kenwood Chef with the dough hook.

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Bread with warts.(before)