Evolution

“Evolution, Mama, Evolution, Mama, Don’t you make a monkey out of me” as the song goes. Some people learn by working their way from one end of a book like Jeffrey Hamelman’s “Bread”to the other. I’m not knocking this approach and it’s an excellent book but I tend to develop by stealing ideas from less […]

Microbakery Courses

Just finished running the first of my new style two-day, individual courses for people who want to set up a microbakery at home. New style because now I’m “retired”. “Retired” means that instead of having 9 varieties of bread in a number of different weights and knocking out around 90 loaves, I select one dough […]

Broa de Milho 1

Jeremy and Azelia have both covered Broa, the Portugese corn bread. Making a bread you have no experience of is tricky because you have no benchmarks and especially when it involves making a porridge of maize where the hydration can vary so much. This one comes from The Taste of Portugal by Edite Vieira, a […]

Burger Me

You might have seen my chum Jeremy (chef not artist) is doing burgers – look here. Well, what do Americans know about burgers? Where I do agree with him is that burger buns are problematic. So, wheeling out the ubiquitous pizza dough again, this is what I did. First hurdle: Thursday morning, starter not refreshed […]

Buns 2 [(Scraps 3) Pizza 7]

Same pizza dough, 24 hrs in the fridge. Tipped the dough onto well floured surface carefully keeping rectangular shape. Cut off half and divided half in two to form two pizzas. Floured the other half, carefully divided into eight with floured scraper (no weighing, no shaping). Baked immediately in hot oven about 12/13 minutes: Not […]

Doughflow2

The overnight cascading dough became 26 large Potato, Rosemary & Black Onion Seed loaves (Dan Lepard if I remember correctly) of which these are two:

Doughflow

I remember years ago someone on a bread forum asking if covering a proving dough with a tea towel would impede it’s rising. Ho, ho, ho!: This sight can be a bit scary early in the morning the first time it happens. These dough boxes were less than half full when they went in the […]

Bread Tasting

All roads lead to Bethesda as the Druids used to say. And so it was that Rick and Maggie Coldman – Mair’s Bakehouse – came to lunch en route from Hamburg to Cwmduad bearing a big bag of goodies from German bakeries. The pastries got scoffed for breakfast before the camera came out but look […]

Buns

Still messing about with the pizza dough here that I try to have available all the time in the fridge. Turned half into a great pizza yesterday, divided the remainder into four, shaped roughly, flattened and put back in the fridge for a second 24 hours. I think burger buns are tricky. In restaurants 99% […]

Le Pain Quotidien (2)

Flying in formation – Nina’s Danish Peasant Bread. She is a great blender of flours. This one is mainly wholemeal rye with some white and wholemeal wheat + 120% white levain. Nestling in the top is Phoebe the dog’s share and a small Simple Danish Rye taster (another Nina recipe), left-over dough from this week’s […]