We got together with Sarah’s family and decided to take bread as a gift. I’m confident with Reinhart’s lean bread recipe now, so that was a given; but I acquired some new bannetons to try out my shaping skills with. The one I have been using at home is for much bigger loaves...

A lamé is used to score the bread before baking. I’ve had lots of problems with this at home, but not in my classes – so I decided to blame the tool. The lamé I bought at Sur la Table just doesn’t seem sharp, so I bought one from SFBI that uses regular double sided razor...

The lean bread recipe from Reinhart is now my favorite bread. In this batch I used instant yeast rather than active dry, and it made a real flavor difference – the smell and flavor of the yeast was definitely there adding a nice layer to the experience. My shaping this time was better...

I used the same recipe as Loaf 27 – the “two feed liquid levain sourdough,” made from the SFBI starter now in it’s third generation. The first step was to take the starter I made after Loaf 27 and do two feedings over a 24 hour period to get it to a 100% hydration, and...

My recipes have all called for Instant Dry yeast, and warned that if you used Active Dry yeast instead you should up the amount by about 25%. My SFBI class instructor also added that Active Dry yeast has quite a few dead yeast cells in it, and they sluff off other things (I forget what) that...

When is 1 tsp. not one teaspoon? When it’s salt. I’ve quickly become a convert in using weights (and metric weights in particular!) for measuring ingredients. This was reinforced in my first week when I learned that one cup of flour could have a weight variance of 25 to 50%,...

With all my new knowledge I felt like it was time to take another pass at Reinhart’s Lean Bread recipe – the one I used in Loaf 16 that made me mad at bread. Success! (Mostly.) Between then and now I’ve learned a lot about measuring ingredients, and I discovered that I...

After my class at San Francisco Baking Institute it was time to practice what I learned. They gave us about 50g of starter to take home which has been living in my fridge for the week. I used the directions that Frank had given us in class for a two feed liquid levain from the starter –...

In Sunday’s San Francisco Baking Institute class we made olive sourdough, rye and semolina loaves. Like Saturday, I made fifteen loaves of bread but am only counting it as three. We had measured all our dry ingredients out on Saturday afternoon, so we were able to jump right into mixing....

San Francisco Baking Institute – Day 1 The San Francisco Baking Institute (www.sfbi.com) is a professional baking school. In addition to their full our professional courses, they offer week long and weekend long classes for those of us not quite ready to get a degree in baking. I signed up...

During a trip into San Francisco I made my way over to Tartine Bakery, one of the best local bakeries. Chad Robertson and Elisabeth Prueitt are the co-owners, well known for their baking books “Tartine” and “Tartine Bread.” The bakery doesn’t have a sign out...

For the most part I feel that I have ciabatta down pretty well. This is the fourth time I’ve made it and it’s reliably good – which isn’t to say I did everything right each time. These loaves were made for friends visiting for the weekend, and they were great. I still...