Reasons to be Cheerful

One thing that cheers me up is getting feedback from students. Couple of weekends back Richard Beaston cashed in his Christmas present (last year’s!) – a baking course voucher bought by his obviously discerning partner. Here’s the picture of his first bread back home after the course. Can you argue with that?

Fragmented Fermentation Technique

Not again, I hear you say. Old Mick trotting out yet another photo of a 2 Kilo Pain de Campagne. But no, this is different, honest. And it introduces a radical new fermentation technique which I am calling “Fragmentation”. Busy weekend. Guy called Richard came to do a bread course which his partner had bought […]

Sourdough?

Browsing through the baking books on Kindle last night and I came across “Baking Real Sourdough Bread” by Dragan Matijevic & Penny Williams. I don’t need another bread book but at under £2.00 it had to be worth looking at. On first skim it looks like a pretty good sourdough introduction but (you knew I […]

Boules?

As a home baker, your job is to produce one perfect loaf which you photograph and wonder if your slashes could have been more assured and if you could have got slightly better oven spring if you’d lobbed a couple more links of red hot chain into the water tray at the bottom of your […]

P d’A III – The Proof

My latest kitchen toy is a dehydrator. So while the starter was been being built, this has been put to use drying out slices of apple from the tree – mainly the good bits of damaged fruit. Having dried them they were rehydrated in Weston’s finest Henry Weston cider which also made up about half […]

P d’ A II

Right, all bets are off (see previous post): That was after about 28 hours. It rose nearly to the arch in the glass before I went to bed. By morning it had fallen back and has now been refreshed at 1:1:1 (starter:water:flour by weight). To be continued.

Pommes d’Amour

Remember Woolworths? A lot of years ago I bought Sue an apple tree as a valentine from Woolworths and brought it back on the bus from Bangor. Produces lovely sharp Coxes some of which we keep till New Year to use in Faisin a la Normande. Our neighbours provide the pheasants. Anyway, Marcus was recently […]

Moonlightin’

Sorry it’s been nothing but barbies but I’ve been been moonlighting on egullet http://forums.egullet.org/topic/149435-baking-bread-from-scratch-in-france/ for the past five weeks. On a whim I thought I would make a starter and see how far I could get with it on holiday and then when we got back a little action feature on reviving my real starter […]

One Mans Cojones …

… is another mans bollocks. But, you know, after all this fishy stuff, we had to go for some macho red meat: I know that doesn’t look very big but that is a T-Bone steak weighing just over a kilo and, as I had to admit to Sue, it cost 26 euros. It wasn’t really […]

Paella

Well, technically it’s not fish porn but it’s a definite seafood orgy. Paella on the barbie: Prawns, mussels, squid and crab. Never coming home.