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,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...