Batard, Banneton and Baguette: the three most common ways that I shape my bread. As the last sourdough loaf of my 100 Loaves of Bread project I decided to make all three shapes from one batch of dough. I was 67% successful at that. My sourdough starter, which is now almost seven months old,...

For Thanksgiving dinner I decided to make epi rolls. Epis are baguettes that have been snipped and shaped so that they look like a wheat stalk after baking. The pieces break off as individual rolls, which works great for a big family meal. I’ve only tried them once before and only did a...

I’ll be baking a lot of bread for a dinner party, so I wanted to get a practice loaf done a day early to learn if I needed to alter my methods to account for the altitude. We decided that baguette loaves would be best, so that we can use day old loaves for bruschetta as an appetizer if...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...