Blog posts

I need a treat. (those usually involve flour and yeast in my house)  Deb Pearlman (Smitten Kitchen) posted a recipe for a cheater braided brioche with lemon curd and cream cheese (A la Danish) I'm tempted. But I don't do regular yeast...so will convert to starter - https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/55004/brioche-orange-blossom-water minus orange blossom water this time. 

Enjoy my finalized rendition of Ken Forkish's Pain de Campagne. 

My wife recently bought me a Traeger pellet smoker for my birthday and I decided to smoke a brisket for its maiden voyage. I needed a nice deli rye to make a killer smoked brisket sandwich and this bake didn’t disappoint!

Finally managed to make two vaguely comparable loaves, one using a 'shaggy' SD biga and the other, in effect, a SD poolish (not dissimilar to the liquid levain I was using in pre-biga bakes, minus the small regular feeds).

A few years ago, Dan Ayo posted here about his experience with using chocolate malted barley from the brew shop in a bread. It made a big difference to the colour of the bread and the flavour of it too.

Good result with this recipe, which includes a tangzhong. I used lemon essence instead of the larger volume of limoncello, and this worked well. 

Shaping:  I placed dough as one piece in the molds, rather than the traditional wings and body approach. I did this by laminating dough into a diamond shape and rolling it from left and right into the center. This created a batard-like shape, heavier in the center. When place in the mold, I gently reach underneath to spread the dough somewhat toward the wing edges. 

OMG! These dog treats smell like Amazeballs!

Hello, dog lovers! And sourdough bread people. Today I have some sourdough discard dog treats working.  The formula I referenced is from Food 52 " Sourdough Discard dog treats"

Enjoy the pictorial formula. I went off the reservation after bring the dough together. My process is listed with the photos. Stop back later, we will have Gronky taste test.

Two eggs are missing from the wet ingredients photo.

Last Christmas my wife bought me some wheat berries from Barton Springs Mill. Unfortunately, she started a major allergen elimination diet not long after that because we thought our newborn was sensitive to something she was eating. That turned out not to be the case, and we're all back to eating everything we want, so I was finally able to compare the two hard red wheats that she got me (Yecora Rojo and Rouge de Bordeaux) to the regular hard red wheat I get from the LDS Home Storage Center.

For my second round, I made the adjustments based on round 1, and used a different recipe to see the contrast. I developed the LM for about three days, but it was still very active from the series last week. 

I added some cocoa powder to the glaze, and baked on a stone in the regular static oven using convection for only the first few minutes. 

This time, recipe from Fabrizio Galla, faithfully followed so that I would have a baseline. It is a nice recipe, makes a dough that is easy to work with, and rises well. 

I had a good handful of toasted sweetened shredded coconut leftover from a pie that I made a couple of weeks ago, so I decided to try adding it to a sandwich bread.  I didn’t want the bread to taste too much like dessert so other than the sugar I used for the stiff sweet levain, there were no other sweeteners added to the dough.  I did decide to add some olive oil to this dough to soften it up a bit and keep it fresh longer without having to make a tangzhong.