2015 already

First course of the year last week and it was a freebee so hasn’t dented the festive debts. Our good friend Kathy was 50 last year so she got a one day sourdough course. She already bakes but had been having trouble with holes in loaves that looked like a cross-section of the Large Hadron […]

2014 was the year of the barbie – last year’s Christmas present was put to good use throughout the year including Christmas Day itself: It was a fabulous day and the turkey was a slow smoked rib of beef. But this year’s present – after some heavy hints – was an Emile Henry pizza stone […]

Christmas Presents 1

Just after Christmas two wiseguys bearing gifts arrived from the yeast. Jay brought a loaf of bread (much needed – bakers never have bread for themselves) and six litres of cider (also much needed because, as the bible says, man cannot live by bread alone). Rick brought me three bags of flour. Flour? What do […]

11.45 a.m.

Look at that, all wrapped and ready (by Sue) before lunch. I mixed on Wednesday lunchtime, fermented at room temperature till about six, scaled, shaped and put in the boxes, proved overnight in the fridge. 5.oo a.m. they came out of the fridge and the first batch went in the oven an hour and a […]

8.45 a.m.

Quarter to nine, everything’s out of the oven. Can actually have breakfast and a bath.

5.15 a.m.

It must be Christmas.

Weird Moroccan Bread

A wheat intolerant guest coincided with a middle eastern meal yesterday which could only mean Kalinté, Moroccan flatbread made with chickpea flour from Paula Wolfert’s book of Moroccan Food. You make a batter of an egg, a couple, of tablespoons of olive oil, a litre of lukewarm water, 350g of gram flour and a couple […]

Autolyse

Been meaning to try this for ages. Mixed two campagne doughs to produce 1K loaves. Held back the salt in one dough for 30 minutes. Apart from that both doughs had three short kneads after mixing and went in the fridge overnight. First surprise. Next morning the autolysed dough had very noticeably risen more than […]

That Dough – Again

This is also weird – the fascination with one straightforward wet, white dough. This is the 80ish% hydration dough that I use primarily for pizza which started through a miscalculation of a yeasted dough from The Bread Collective – a confusion of US/Metric/Imperial cups, that sort of thing. Usually I knock it up and put […]