Blog posts

It’s been a while since I posted my successes with flaking grain. I got new oat groats from Breadtopia and wanted to do a very short tutorial. I have an older Marga Marcato hand crank with aluminum rollers. The steel rollers are not available and the price of this one has gone up. There are other flakers available and the Mock Mill folks have an electric one. 

This is my take on a Finnish bread.  I've changed it up quite a bit from the original, so I'm not sure I should even call it that anymore.  For the most part, the ingredients are true to the recipe.  However, this uses a 2-stage pre-ferment, a yeast water for leavening, and a mash.  The original is a straight dough yeasted recipe.

After I posted my first sourdough Mazanec and Vanocka, I heard from many European bakers on IG who love these breads and they said that they eat them year round that’s how much they are loved.  We leave for Florida in a couple of days, unless we are delayed by the newly forming tropical storm, so I needed to bake another Christmas present, this time for the staff of our building.  With the feedback from the first bake, I decided to make some adjustments to Maurizio Leo’s recipe.

A few weeks ago I accidentally got into baguettes. I liked the sound of alfanso’s baguettes with durum flour, fennel, pine nuts, and golden raisins, so I attempted them. They came out ok but I wanted to see whether I could improve my technique. 

Ok, so I'm not an artist in any way, shape, or form!  Lovely images that I can see in my mind's eye always turn out as stick figures, and not very good ones at that! :)  So, it's a bit surprising, then, that I decided to try some decorative scoring on my weekly loaves this week.  Back story.......we hosted our annual Halloween party on Monday, and one of our guests brought a loaf of bread that had a "Jack Skellington" skeleton face scored on the top of it.  I thought to myself, "Hey, this would be a cool thing for me to make next year to go with my BBQ Skeleton.....

I ran out of bread, hard to believe since I’m semi retired with more time to bake, but it happened.  I found a bit of whole kamut in the back of the closet so that gave me the idea of combining it with some semola rimacinata (semolina) since they are related and both have a great yellow colour.  I decided to try doing a cold retard after shaping.  I’ve never done this with a milk bread that I can recall.  This is the reason for the blisters on the crust, which for this type of bread I’m not a huge fan of.

TFL is such a great community.  We share ideas, advice, recipes, and help each other, in general, along the way.  In some cases, we get to know each other at an almost personal level.  At least as personal as you can get communicating virtually with someone you’ve never met. 😁 Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to put a voice with a virtual face and have lunch with Paul (pmccool).

I made the Walter Sands white bread from King Arthur in October and tried doing a swirl. I rolled my dough a wee bit too thin in the middle, but it was offset by having a pocket of sugar peeking out at the end. It was gone in 3 days. The only problem I had was that the swirl kept separating from the bread. It was not fun to pull it out of the toaster.

 i was very fortunate to be gifted some flour that is grown locally by a farmer and stone ground on site. I wanted to do the Flour justice and was given the tip that it was exceptional by the owner of a very successful local bakery  that is doing great things here in Western Australia. Thankyou Lachie and Big Loaf.