Bread and Cheese

True job satisfaction, according to Dan Pink, comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose according, and I agree. In search of satisfaction, I therefore set out to do something I’d never done before. Bake bagels for brunch. I used to live in the same road as one of the great remaining bagel bakeries in East London, [...]

Swedish friends invited us for a casual supper and a movie, and I was arrogant enough to think that I could make them a Swedish-style rye bread. I’d already established, with the same Swedes, that the term limpa, which I had always understood to mean a type of bread, a recipe, in fact described a [...]

I’d been longing to try one of those whole-grain soaker recipes for ages, but had to wait for the time to visit the whole foods shop to score some millet seeds; never seen them anywhere else. And then I had to wait another few days for a baking day. And a final delay of a [...]

One of my favourite recipes in Bernard Clayton Jr’s Complete Book of Breads is Oatmeal Sesame Bread. The crumb is delicious and moist, from the oatmeal, and great for sandwiches. So I decided to convert it to weights and to use a sourdough starter. 100 gm white flour starter at 100% hydration 120 gm rolled [...]

It has been walnut season here for a couple of weeks, and we’ve been merrily cracking them at every opportunity. That, and glowing plaudits at The Fresh Loaf, persuaded me to try Dan Lepard’s Walnut Loaf. Dan is rapidly becoming one of my favourite bread mavens (Santa knows this) and after the stunning success of [...]

The Main Squeeze spotted this recipe on the same page as the Saffron Couscous, Chickpea and Lentil Salad she was making, ripped out of The Guardian Weekend magazine for 19 September 2009. It looked good. And it contained something I’ve never seen before in a bread recipe: a kind of roux, flour boiled in a [...]

First off, 2000 words. The complete story. With all the great help I’ve had at The Fresh Loaf, I managed a pretty good hot weather sourdough loaf last time. My notes then suggested giving the shaped loaves longer at room temperature and scoring more resolutely, and so at the first possible opportunity, that’s what I [...]

Tunneling hither and yon through the internets I have been learning more and more about sourdough fermentation and why my bread hasn’t been too pretty of late. Advice suggested that I feed the starter with strong flour, reduce the amount of starter to 10% and slow the whole process down by using the fridge to [...]