Loaf 46 – Oven Bake-off Loaves Jun01

Loaf 46 – Oven...

The method I have been using to simulate a hearth oven with steam is to use a pizza stone in the oven and put about a cup of water in a broiler pan at the bottom of the oven. Everything is pre-heated to 500° before the dough and water go in. Another popular method is to use an inverted Dutch...

Loaf 45 – Ciabatta for Meals May20

Loaf 45 – Ciab...

Not every loaf of bread I bake now has a specific learning purpose, and that’s great. I feel like I’ve already accomplished what I wanted to learn with this project, which is to understand bread well enough that I can “whip up a batch” whenever we want it. That was the...

Loaves 43, 44 – 28 Loaves for a Party Apr28

Loaves 43, 44 –...

You would think that 28 loaves of bread would get me pretty far along on my mission of baking 100 loaves of bread, but these 28 loaves only count as TWO – one white and one nine grain. They are all made from two huge 4kg batches of dough. Every semester we have all the ETC-SV students...

Loaf 42 – Lesson: Don’t Forget Ingredients Apr27

Loaf 42 – Less...

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,...

Loaf 41 – Better (not yet great) Sourdough Apr23

Loaf 41 – Bett...

More sourdough using the SFBI starter which I’ve been feeding every 12 to 14 days but haven’t used in awhile. The starter needed to be fed twice to get a nice liquid levain going. I did this on a Saturday so I could bake on Sunday for dinner and for gifts at Sarah’s work on...

Loaf 40 – Orig...

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...

Loaf 39 – Testing a Proof, QED Apr13

Loaf 39 – Test...

I haven’t yet mastered how long to proof my breads before baking, so I decided to do a test to understand what happens when a loaf is over-proofed. The results from this experiment weren’t at all what I expected. But before the punchline, here’s some background information....

Loaf 38 – A Seeded Whole Wheat Original Apr08

Loaf 38 – A Se...

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...

Loaf 37 – Shapeshifting Ciabatta Rolls Apr02

Loaf 37 – Shap...

It’s nice to be to the point where I can confidently make delicious bread for purely utilitarian reasons. We were planning our dinner menu for the week and thought that BBQ beef sandwiches would be good one night. And, they’d be extra good on ciabatta rolls. I mixed up the dough...

Loaf 36 – French Epis and Boules Apr01

Loaf 36 – Fren...

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...

Loaf 35 – ABin5, 8 Days Later Mar24

Loaf 35 – ABin...

The “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day” (ABin5) recipe says the dough will last up to 14 days in the fridge. It’s been eight since I made Loaf 33, so I thought it would be a good idea to see how the remainder of the dough is surviving. I’ve been smelling it every few...

Loaf 34 – More SFBI Sourdough Mar24

Loaf 34 – More...

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,...