Full description to come… 4kg of mixed lean dough 4kg building structure after a few stretch and folds New 4kg batch of 9 Grain (with honey!) – it’s hard to believe this blob will turn into b

We had a dinner party for my students last Friday night, and I thought it would be nice to give them all a loaf of bread to take home afterwards. More details about that in the next post (Loaves 43, 44), because this post is about the batch that failed. I made two 4 kilogram batches of bread,...

More sourdough using the SFBI starter which I’ve been feeding every 12 to 14 days but haven’t used in awhile. The starter needed to be fed twice to get a nice liquid levain going. I did this on a Saturday so I could bake on Sunday for dinner and for gifts at Sarah’s work on...

My Seeded Whole Wheat Original bread (loaf 38) was almost excellent. The plan for this loaf was to make it again, but sweetened with honey (per my lesson from loaf 38) to tweak the flavor. When I was buying seeds at Whole Foods I decided to try this with their bulk 9 Grain mixture instead of...

I haven’t yet mastered how long to proof my breads before baking, so I decided to do a test to understand what happens when a loaf is over-proofed. The results from this experiment weren’t at all what I expected. But before the punchline, here’s some background...

Loaves 9 and 10 were Seeded Whole Wheat loaves using a recipe from the first bread class I took at Sur La Table. They were terrible failures, though the one we made in class was excellent. I still don’t know what we did in class that wasn’t reflected in the recipe. Now that I have...

It’s nice to be to the point where I can confidently make delicious bread for purely utilitarian reasons. We were planning our dinner menu for the week and thought that BBQ beef sandwiches would be good one night. And, they’d be extra good on ciabatta rolls. I mixed up the dough...

My Mom’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to show up with bread in hand for her and my sister. I hadn’t made Reinhart’s French bread since Loaves 11 and 14. I had a few minor issues with those, but I’ve learned so much since then that it seemed pretty easy now (and...

The “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” (ABin5) recipe says the dough will last up to 14 days in the fridge. It’s been eight since I made Loaf 33, so I thought it would be a good idea to see how the remainder of the dough is surviving. I’ve been smelling it every few...

It was time to feed my SFBI sourdough starter, so I used that as an excuse to try a new batch and see if I can improve the crumb that I’ve been getting. The recipe and process was the same as Loaf 29 until the final shaping step. I did the first sourdough feeding on Wednesday evening,...

This recipe is from the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois – or ABin5 as its online shorthand has evolved to. The book has been on our shelf for almost a year, and I’m only now delving into it. You can’t actually make bread in five...

My Irish bride requested Irish Soda Bread for St. Patrick’s day. She had a recipe on a 3×5 card from an old family member, but isn’t sure exactly who – so we decided that it must be the traditional family recipe. Before making it I did some research online about soda...