Blog posts

Well, it has been a while. Having sufficiently recovered from my broken wrist, I have finally been able to start baking bread again. I have been chronicling my progress on Instagram, but was so excited with this new recipe that I decided to come back and blog about it. I ran across Trevor Wilson on Instagram (I see that he is also here. Hi Trevor!) and was drooling over his yummy loaves and then the video for his Champlain sourdough came up on my YouTube suggestion list. I was intrigued by his technique that I just had to try it!

I've always felt comfortable with cooking--not necessarily good at it, but comfortable--but I never considered myself a baker. In fact, until I began baking bread a year and a half ago, the extent of my baking was throwing the specified ingredients in a hand-me-down Breadman bread-machine, because, well, we had it, and I'm a sucker for new gadgets, even if it's someone else's old gadget. The bread was ok, but it's only real appeal was that we were involved in the process. Unsurprisingly, we didn't use it very often, and I didn't care.

Pane Tipo di Altamura

20 April, 2016

David Snyder

This is the latest bake in my series of attempts to produce a good looking and good flavored Pane Tipo di Altamura. I have continued to make modifications based on my experience to date and the experience and resources shared by other TFL members who are also working on this style of bread.

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"I Got Back Jack and did it again..."

Once more with my SJSD inspired rye baguettes with caraway seeds.  But with a new twist and the formula sheet, now that it has been "time tested".  For a small change of direction I decided to make these as Gros Baguettes, 450g each.  So they are pretty hefty, and I wouldn't expect to see these in many bakeries.  But it worked.  The formula:

SJSD based Rye with Caraway Seeds

So my virginal sourdough starter finally got big and healthy enough for me to actually use it last Friday. In a frenzy to use my new pet, I baked two loaves on Saturday. The first was a "traditional" idea of a basic sourdough loaf, with a lot of wholegrains. If I recall, the flour was about 50/30/20 between white, wholemeal and wholemeal spelt flour. It was on the low end of what I've learned to be acceptable hydration, mainly because I made the rookie error of spending too much time handling the bread and, worried about stickiness, kept adding more flour.

Hey, it's a baking site; enough with the sniggering already.

So I had this post about half-written and managed to blow it away with an ill-placed click of the mouse.  Since I don't feel like recreating it, this will be the condensed version.

It's warm enough for grilling and smoking to begin in earnest.  That means buns are coming to the fore again.

This was one of those, what was I thinking breads.  I had read about a porridge bread someone else posted about where they soaked the cracked rye overnight in water, and for some reason that translated to me as let's soak whole durum berries in water overnight and make a porridge from them.  I should have known that I didn't do something right when the porridge was taking forever to solidify and didn't absorb all of the water as usual.  Next time I need to either crack the durum berries first or soak them overnight in hot boiling water.  The berries were soft when added

Recept és videó Farkas Vilmos oldalán!

Első próbálkozásom, fonott kalács hat szálból.
Farkas Vilmos receptje szerint készítettem, nagyon finom lett.

The third installment in my yeast water experiment and I'm getting to really like the stuff. All the grains are fresh ground and sifted to between 90 and 95% extraction depending on the grain except the corn. All the water besides that in the leaven build is yeast water, white wheat was used for the build as well as the  sifted out  brans. The other grains were a sprouted multigrain mix (millet, rye, einkorn, and turkey red), Masa Harina, Einkorn, and Red Fife. The leaven build was started early AM, the dough mixed late AM, and the loaf baked late afternoon.