Blog posts

One of my favorite parts of baking bread is the scoring. It gives me a chance to get a bit creative and end up with a great-looking loaf. I am, however, no expert on scoring bread. It occurred to me that a good way to get some control over the way my slashes look would be to attempt some calligraphy. This worked nicely with a sourdough boule, made with a portion of whole wheat flour. I thought Hebrew would be the best language to attempt the slashes in, as the shapes of the letters remind me a lot of bread slashes. So here it is, along with a picture of the crumb.

 I decided to use some of my leftover mashed potatoes along with some of French Style flour from KAF I bought during my recent visit.  I milled some fresh whole wheat flour and instead of using it as is I decided to try sifting out some of the hard bits and ended up with a medium extraction flour.  I have a finer sieve which next time I will use as a second step to get a real high extraction flour.

Thanks to some encouragement, I figured it was time to stretch myself some by experimenting... A bit like taking the training wheels off a bicycle I suppose. I begun with one of my favourite recipes for a basic wholemeal sourdough and modified it by adding a soaker and a little yeast, the latter to give me a bit more predictability - everything was scaled to give me a pair of 600g loaves.

Levain:

87g wholemeal bread flour

87g warm water

20g rye starter

Soaker:

30g porridge oats

30g seed mix

40g rye flour

Yesterday was a hectic day and this bread is one of the reasons. Last Sunday, I saw some beautiful red beans so I bought some; that same day while watching a late night movie minutes before midnight I decided to make red bean paste for tomorrow and I proceeded to wash and soak the beans so they will be ready for tomorrow.

Let me start out by saying, Im terrible with electronics and this is my first time trying to solder anything. So I if I can do it, everyone can!

My goal was to make a device that can be used with most cooling boxes without any (or very little) modifications to the actual Cooling box.

The advantage of these kind of coolers are that they can heat or cool. It depends on how you turn the plug. I only needed it to do one at a time.

Dear TFL experts,

I have been baking for the past 3 years, and just recently tried my hand in making baguettes. I should say that all my knowledge for this craft has came from the wonderful posts of the members on this forum - and I am very grateful to have access to such excellent resource. 

I felt I owed the good people of TFL an apology for my previous bread (which, oddly enough, was very good!). That apology, it seems, will have to come in the form of these nice little dark rye batards.

We bakers are always looking for creative ways to extract lots of flavor from grains. For me, the search for flavor took me to my local supermarket.

We recently enjoyed a marvelous cruise from Vancouver (didn't get the opportunity to say hi to Floyd) up through the Inside Passage of Alaska.  We had port calls at Ketchikan, Juneau (emphasis on the 'eau', with 320 days of rain a year), and Skagway.  From there we sailed to Glacier Bay and spent a day marveling at the immensity and beauty of several glaciers.  Then it was on to our debarkation at Seward.  From Seward, we opted for the train excursion to Anchorage, then another train excursion to Denali, then a coach excursion to Fairbanks, and our flight home.

This bread has a history in experimentation. The other day I was contemplating what sort of side dish to have with smoked chicken and decided to try a savory porridge polenta style but made with various coarse ground grains. The mill was set on its widest and some barley, oats, Einkorn, rye,and Durum was ground, to that mixture some grits were added so that it came  to 1.5 cups.