Experimental baking I have dickered and experimented and gradually over recent years come up with a succesful recipe, rather a complex one as ingredients go, for gluten free (GF) bread to stand alongside Breadzilla’s outstanding sourdough. It has not been easy but eventually a pretty decent loaf evolved which, while quite dense, makes [...]
Oat and Seed Loaf The search for the perfect daily bread recipe continues and this is the latest iteration worthy of sharing with the bread-making chums of my acquaintance. This loaf is one I make regularly for toast and sandwiches … slicing bread in other words. The recipe also makes excellent rolls for [...]
This is an adaptation of a recipe culled from a baking blog (thanks Emily for the link) the URL of which I omitted to save. I have been playing around with various methods of making focaccia and I think this one comes the closest to my personal ideal of what the bread should [...]
J has two volumes of a cookery book published in 1901 that belonged to her grandmother. Fascinating reading - “The past is a foreign country” really takes on meaning looking through this. So - suggestions for your next dinner party of family meal menu. Three courses, of course: Fish - Cold salmon [...]
Friends have asked and I have been working hard on the methodology as well as doing a course at a pro-bakery. As a result I have revised some old material about making basic and tasty sourdough bread at home. If a simple way to make tasty sourdough breads interests you then you can find [...]
Learning More About Bread I have been making most of our bread for over 30 years. Originally I used to use yeast as the raising agent but since Breadzilla (another post about her sometime in the future) came into my life a decade ago, gifted by an American colleague who really knows her [...]
We are in the depths of winter hereabouts so we are wandering off on a parallel path this week to talk about bread instead of gardens. The garden is under a couple of feet of snow and ice and there’s only so much you can say about feeder-birds to engage one’s audience. When I [...]
A Seasonal Service for our Friends That title is perhaps not entirely honest as the shrubs in question are not quite what you were expecting if you come here for gardening news. However, the Winter Solstice approaches, followed by Christmas and the New Year with all the jollifications those three dates imply … and [...]
In England last week I happened across a book for sourdough bread bakers ("Do Sourdough - Slow Bread for Busy Lives" by Andrew Whitley who runs, quote, one of Britain's leading organic bakeries). What's nice about it is that the methods are born of real life commercial practice with a healthy leavening of serious science [...]
We purchased an Iranian flat(ish) bread recently that was so excellent I tried to reproduce it. What I managed to come up with - and this is a work in progress that has to be refined - was a perfect simulacrum of the original in all respects except that it was most decidedly not flat [...]