Bread and Cheese

Every time I see pita bread for sale in stores these days I chuckle to myself. €1.40 for ~5 is a typical price around here. This recipe will make four times that quantity, for a third of the cost, and what’s even better is that, as with all … Pr…

The ancient heirloom Italian grain called farro is enjoying a resurgence of popularity in the U.S. Actually, compared to most of the tosh one reads on the subject, this does indeed sort out the confusion, a bit. One thing to remember is not so much tha…

It is the day before Christmas and I wouldn’t be cooking normally. If I am in Beirut, it is either my mother or sister at the stoves and if I am in England, I would be in the country with my English adoptive family. Anissa’s recipe for Moroccan bread i…

Whether the focus is on breads, desserts or pretzels, stores are following European tradition, where rye is rye, not caraway. Some good recipes for Christmas baking.

From Rob Corso and Meg Sheehan: now if they could make it with interchangeable imprinting elements, they’d be onto a global sure-fire winner.

I read this piece in the New York Times, about the desirability of using weights, not volumes to measure ingredients when it first came out a month ago. And naturally ignored it; I mean, who needs to be told that? But today, when I went to print it out for some people who might need to [...]

I had a bunch of good, ripe 100% starter left over from a batch of oatmeal sesame bread that I made last weekend. I wanted a seedy bread, but I finished the last of the sunflower seeds a couple of breads ago, and haven’t got enough items on the mail-oder shopping list to get some [...]

Continuing to look for farina di grano arso, I’ve found somewhere that sells online, but availability is limited. Better yet, a friend over at The Fresh Loaf showed more initiative than me and actually looked in the Italian Wikipedia. There she found a detailed description — ground from grains gleaned in burned over fields — [...]

My breadchum Joanne took off for New York a couple of weeks ago, and before she left I persuaded her to lend me Hamelman’s Bread to plunder. the first thing I did from it was a Semolina Bread with a soaker and fennel seed, made with commercial yeast. It was really good, and I planned [...]

No, not fallen. Never-risen. I should have known better than to trumpet the satisfaction my bread-making gives me; yesterday’s experiment was a colossal failure. Bad inventory management left me with any white bread flour and an excess of yummy durum flour. I don’t normally bake 100% durum anything, so I cast about for recipes and [...]