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...

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%,...