Pain des Pommes

Sitting on my kitchen window sill for the last three or four years is a jar with chopped apples in the bottom plus water plus a little sugar. Sitting in my garden is a solitary Cox apple tree that I bought for Sue as a Valentine present quite a lot of years earlier. When the […]

Green Pest Control

Here at Bethesdabakers we take our pest control obligations very seriously. But sustainability and carbon reduction are equally weighty considerations and here we try to combine the two. Take the fly killer in my workroom, cum office, cum flour store, cum junk room. It doesn’t need a power supply, batteries or even winding up. It […]

A Confusion of Slashes

As promised, a couple of photos from last week’s bake. 1. Two shelves from my Blueseal oven. Same as in my previous post – the open slashes were on the lower shelf: What it does show is my crap technique; I obviously drag the blade downwards towards me making the slash deeper at the near […]

Marcus Row’s Wheat Beer & Red Onion Bread

Tomorrow Marcus is arriving to do the two-day, individual microbakery course. As guest baker he is invited to submit a sourdough recipe to be the weekly special – and he has sent his Wheat Beer & Red Onion Bread formula which you can find on his blog here. We have been busy with it already […]

Raw Bread

Here are some pictures to look at while I think of something interesting to say (although I have been a bit naughty here) You don’t see that many photos of bread before it hits the oven: And some out of the oven:

Bara Planc

Very foolishly got involved in a “discussion” about additives in bread on the Australian Sourdough Companion forum this week – http://www.sourdough.com – got called a few names that included the suggestion I was living in the past. So what bread have I baked this week? Well, months ago someone ordered 6 x 2 kilo loaves […]

Pane Pugliese

Here’s one I baked earlier. In 2004 actually – and then rewrote it in 2007: One of the most influential bread books of recent times (I have to be careful saying that – it was first published in 1985) is Carol Field’s The Italian Baker. It’s the sort of book you could spend a lifetime […]

Bara Surgeirch

I’m doing a little series of Welsh related breads for my customers this Autumn. The first one was Nina’s Watermill Loaf which I suppose is Danish given that Nina’s Danish. But she put it together in Bethesda using flours from Felin Ganol so that counts. This week is Bara Surgeirch – Sour Oatmeal Bread: – […]

Busiest Week of the Year

Two weeks ago I announced the quietest week of the year. Well I was wrong – last week was with a mere 33K of dough. This week the school holidays are over with a vengence and I baked my age in kilos – 64. It’s too much – 4.30 a.m. start, last customer 9.00 p.m. […]

Fast Food?

It’s always struck me that the most common “fast” foods are neither easy nor quick to prepare at home – I mean prepare properly, not take out of the freezer. Take fish and chips. Deep frying is an art and a dangerous art at that especially when, like me, you use a wok as a […]