Blog posts

.............Am I a coward?

Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across?

Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?

Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' th' throat

As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?   Ha!

Shakespeare, Hamlet II,2.

Broken Nose Bread

And so it came to pass that I was having a quiet morning at the office when I got a call from The Husband.  "I've just come out of A&E" says he.  "That's nice," say I.  Possibly not the right answer.

Thought I'd be a little more adventurous this weekend and opted instead of my usual plain rustic Sourdough breads to bake something different. I found in my wife's pantry some almonds and honey and recollecting a recipe I'd seen somewhere decided these would be perfect for my bread. I set out with my levain starter which had been fed 5 hours previously and using organic stone ground unbleached white flour a little salt and bottled water made up my dough I left it to prove for 5 hours by which time it had doubled in size.

with apologies to C. Dickens.

The Levain (Charles St. Evrémonde)

Had a dinner party this weekend and wanted to make Forkish's Overnight Country Blonde to cut up for an appetizer. I didn't schedule accordingly—whoops!—and ended up making Forkish's 80% biga instead. (I threw in some olives during the folding process for good measure.) Since I already started the dough for Overnight Country Blonde, I proceeded to close it up on Sunday, after the fact, but it's OK; I'm now graced with a boule for dinner tonight.

It's about 95F this weekend in Southern California, so I had to adjust the schedule.

Not much to say about this one. Tasty and didn't last through the evening.

It had been a while since we had used our cherry yeast water so we decided to make aa large 1 stage levain using some hard bits that was a 13% extraction multigrain soft and some AP.  It was refrigerated for 2 days after it doubled for this bake but we used some of it yesterday to make the cherry YW buns.

Several years ago, when I first started haunting TFL for clues on how to make Jewish Rye, I came across references to George Greenstein's Secrets of a Jewish Baker.   The breads I made from this book were god awful which had nothing to do with George Greenstein and everything to do with the (lack of) skill of the baker.   As time went on and I learned more about bread baking in general and Jewish Rye in particular, SOAJB got pushed to the back of the shelf and almost forgotten.  And yet people like David Snyder reminded me of it with his occasional Jewish Corn Rye b

We needed some buns for tonight's monthly hamburger and sausage feast.  Sadly,  my wife won't be around for dinner meaning that I can really have a feast. if i want to pay the price later with some wrath coming my way!  It was 64 F this morning so Lucy was a little more feisty than usual so she sort of winged this one;

One of the reasons I started learning how to make bread was that one of my favorite foods was pizza, and I was never quite happy with my crust, I felt that crusts I got at good pizza places were usually better. My pizza making efforts started in the 1980s. In 2011 I gave up eating cheese, should have never had it due to milk allergy, and I took my last picture of my last cheese pizza (not sure where that photo is) at the same time.

The other day I happened upon a video, New York Pizza Crust by Bruno Di Fabio.

I just got home last night from the UK (still really jet-lagged!) where I keep a supply of sourdough starter that I carried over last year in checked baggage from our home in California.  I revived it fairly easily after it had been left in the fridge for several months.