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...

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...

As the first step in my new Scientific Method for Learning How to Bake Great Bread (there is no acronym for this), I’m comparing the three flours that I’ve been using – Whole Foods Organic, King Arthur, and Gold Medal. I made three versions of 1/3 size batches of the French...

I’m mad at bread right now. These loaves, like about 50% of my other loaves, were a failure. I expect mistakes, which is why I decided to make 100 loaves in the first place, but this batch seemed so similar to my prior Loaf 14 success that I figured it was a sure thing. This was the...