Bread and Cheese

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 oats
360 gm [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

First thing I did on getting back from hols was to wake the sleeping sourdough and then set to. I was determined to produce a better loaf, despite the heat: over 30℃ in the kitchen by day, and nowhere else much cooler. Step one was to find a stronger flour. I’d always used Barilla 00, [...]

I’d been looking forward to this evening all week. (How sad is that?) It was time to bake, or at least to prepare loaves to bake tomorrow morning. I’ll deal with that tomorrow morning, when the bread comes out of the oven for judgement. For now, lets just say that it was very scary. And [...]

This whole “sticky dough” episode of late has been nagging at me.. Then I remembered, I had this problem once before. But did I write about it? I did! That time, I didn’t think much more about it than plastic bag=condensation, because there were all sorts other things going on with the dough. And the [...]

Last week’s very sticky dough prompted me to try something even worse this week. I made a 55% dough (not very wet, I know, but wetter than I started with last time) thinking that I could try the stretch and fold method of building structure. Disaster. Last night the mixture was bubbling away, looking lively [...]