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...

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...

Unlike sourdough, I think I have the ciabatta down now. I used a few grams too much water, which gave it a hydration of 82% instead of the recipe’s 80%. Shaping it was almost impossible, and moving it after the first shaping didn’t work at all (I was supposed to flip it over to...

My sourdough class is another two weeks away, but I thought I’d try another loaf with my starter (which I’ve been feeding and keeping alive in the fridge). I used the same recipe from Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day that I used for Loaf 15, and the resulting failure was...