Yeasted “Sourdough”

You all know my views on adding commercial yeast to sourdough. Add yeast and its not sourdough any more. When I was teaching people for an employment project some years backI experimented with hybrids and they most definitely inferior to naturally leavened loaves. When you try to find out the reasons bakers add yeast they […]

Pizza (1)

So, to start a new life. In less than two weeks I officially become an Old Age Pensioner and the microbakery becomes history. Big party to plan. Once that’s out of the way, finish my second book and run more bread courses. Just when I think I can unpack my deckchair I get a call […]

Weight a bit!

First, Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you all thrive in the coming months (without recourse to commercial yeast). You know me: tend to go my own way and ignore advice to spray ovens, use a baking stone, bake in pots, do the window pane test, etc., etc. Never worried too much about recipe […]

Waitrose Essentials

Or what you might call Magi-mix. Got about thirty to mix tomorrow. Then there’s all those biscotti to make: And then there’s the regular bake on Thursday Never mind. Soon be Christmas.

Baby Jesus Time

Couple of years ago, Klimentini, one of our most enthusiastic customers, gave us her family recipe for Christmas bread. Her brother used to send her one from Greece but last time it arrived weeks late in small pieces because Homeland Security, or whatever we call it, thought the astonishingly strong spices were there to disguise […]

All The Bs

Is this good bread or is this good bread: I can say that because it’s not my bread. It’s Baker Biker Ben from the BBC. Makes you sick. Bleedin’ amateurs turning out bread of that quality. Ben is one of the few bakers who have made it to all five of the annual baking events, […]

Beet This

It all started when I was making Vampiros for a Halloween special. Vampiros, as you know, is a spicy adaption of Tomato Bread with Sundried Tomatoes – add smoked paprika, chile and a good whack of tequila to the tomato sauce. This year I wanted to find a way of getting the dough a brilliant […]

Bourbon

It’s that time of year again when my American customers start to clamour for Bethesdabakers’ famous Thanksgiving Bread: The secret ingredient? Bourbon. Soak your cranberries in a good shot of whiskey for an hour then complete the soaker with orange juice. Rye starter, flour mix of white, wholemeal wheat and rye, plenty of pecans. Sam’s […]

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 […]

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 […]