Bread & Baking – Page 2

April’s early breads

2014-04-07 2014-04-07 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

April has begun with three loaves of bread; generally successful efforts, although there’s still some tweaking to do with the recipes. As always. But I’m encouraged to try more – and of course experiment more with recipes and ingredients. The first loaf of the latest batch was an artisan loaf made at the tail end of March. Started with an overnight poolish and the standard artisan recipe I’ve been using for a while now (derived from one found online). All unbleached white flour in the … click below for more ↓

Is this the end of the gluten-free fad?

2014-04-01 2014-04-01 Bread & Baking / Critical Thinking / Food & Drink / Pseudoscience & Quackery4 Comments

Last November, when I first wrote about the gluten-free diet fad, I bemoaned how an everyday protein, a staple in human diets for many millennia, had become demonized by the diet fad crowd. In fact, the gluten-free fad rapidly grew into a multi-million-dollar industry in Canada to accommodate that vulnerable intersection of consumer fears and gullibility.* Back when I was writing my piece, the National Post had a piece that indicated while nine million Canadians were allegedly on a gluten-free diet or avoided gluten for … click below for more ↓

The late March breads

2014-03-26 2014-03-26 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

A couple more loaves were made this month and a third will be started later this week. Both were made in the oven, not the machine, at 425F for roughly 35 minutes. Neither rose very high, but both were edible and tasty. Only about a third of the second loaf remains, so I will start a poolish today for baking a new loaf tomorrow. First up: a sourdough, made from the levain I keep in the fridge. All-sourdough: this time I didn’t use any commercial yeast … click below for more ↓

Loafing around again

2014-03-10 2014-03-10 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Been at it again this month. Bread making, I mean. You knew that from the image, right? Several efforts so far this month and March isn’t even half-way through its course. Winter remains firmly entrenched here, and spring – or any time without a thick layer of snow – looks far away. So it’s a good time to be making bread. First up: banana bread. I haven’t made many fruit loaves – mostly raisin-cinnamon – but have always wanted to try this. And it’s not … click below for more ↓

Raisin and sourdough this week

2014-02-08 2014-02-08 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

While I haven’t tried to make a sourdough raisin bread yet, that idea occurred to me while I was making my latest breads, this week. I’m sure it would be a good mix, but I’ll have to build my levain up again, since I used all my countertop levain in yesterday’s bread (about 350g). I still have a culture in the fridge, however, and will take some out to get it going in the warmer kitchen, today. I made a medium-sized sourdough loaf, and two … click below for more ↓

Corn and other breads

2014-02-03 2014-02-03 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The last loaf of January, 2014 was a machine-made corn bread, made using a recipe from Washburn’s & Butt’s 300 Best Canadian Bread Machine Recipes book that I’ve mentioned previously. It’s a good book for bread machine users. Unlike my previous efforts to tinker with bread recipes, I used the basic, printed 1.5-lb. recipe without any alterations this time (not even in the salt). Medium crust setting, basic (white) bread menu selection. The results were good, if not spectacular. The recipe calls for 1/3rd cup … click below for more ↓

Water, water, everywhere

2014-01-23 2014-01-23 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Hydration matters. Not just to athletes and long distance runners. It matters to bakers. How much water is in your dough is crucial to how the crumb develops. It’s amazing how a few grams more or less of water can make a real difference in the resulting loaf of bread. This week I did a little experiment that got me thinking about hydration. I made a loaf of bread in the machine using the “French” recipe and settings, (see my previous post about making French … click below for more ↓

The Short and the Tall of It

2014-01-20 2014-01-20 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

This past week saw several new experiments in my bread laboratory. Okay, it’s a kitchen, but sometimes it feels like a lab, what with all the tinkering and testing I do. I just can’t seem to stop trying new things in bread. It would fee even more science-like if Susan would let me buy the implements and tools I want. First, however, the good news: my levain remains thriving and healthy. I have two batches now: one on the counter, the other in the fridge. … click below for more ↓

Two more loaves, new lessons learned

2014-01-12 2014-01-12 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

Following up on my desire to make homemade raisin-cinnamon bread for Susan, I spent several hours collecting recipes online and entering their ingredients into a spreadsheet so i could compare them. Quite a range in the amounts of some (like cinnamon and sugar). Then an Amazon order arrived, which included a 2012 book called 300 Best Canadian Bread Machine Recipes, by Donna Washburn and Heather Butt. Good book, lots of great stuff in it and many ideas to try. And it’s by far the best bread … click below for more ↓

What, no raisin bread?

2014-01-05 2014-01-05 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & DrinkLeave a comment

I have a large – and growing – stack of books about bread. So many that I’m running out of shelf space for them all. Some are for artisan bread, some for regular homemade bread (traditional recipes, usually with lots of kneading), others are for bread machines. A couple are generic “all-about-breads-of-the-world” books with recipes. Yet only one of 15 has a recipe for making the basic raisin-cinnamon bread. This is a loaf I want to make in the bread machine on the timer, so next … click below for more ↓

A Tale of Two Loaves

2014-01-04 2014-01-04 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

An interesting experiment this week: using the same basic set of ingredients to make bread, but one made by hand, the other in the bread machine, both made the same day. I’ve been curious about this ever since I got the machine. Would the two methods create similar breads if I used roughly the same ingredients? I say roughly because I used a bread machine recipe found in a book, including all of the ingredients listed (substituting a small amount of honey for the sugar … click below for more ↓

Looking back on 2013

2013-12-31 2014-01-02 Blog & Blogging / Bread & Baking / Games & Gaming / Municipal Politics / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

It’s been quite a year, both personally and politically. The best of times, the worst of times, to paraphrase Dickens. Looking back on 2103, it was a busy, eventful, successful, and yet often challenging year. I accomplished many things on different levels – personal and professional – and, I believe, overcame some of the challenges I faced. A lot happened locally, too, much of which development I take pride in having been a party to. Collingwood Council has been very productive, pro-active and progressive this term; … click below for more ↓

The last loaves of 2013

2013-12-26 2013-12-26 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

As my stock of bread dwindles, I’m contemplating what breads to bake this weekend, as well as what I may want to try before the New Year. I’m also pondering my baking successes and failures these past few months. Mostly successes, although a few have been “qualified” successes – edible but not optimal. First my levain – sourdough – mix got dumped last week. It went off and really stank. Unpleasant. I suspected it was struggling for a couple of weeks, ever since I tried … click below for more ↓

Salt and bread making

2013-12-22 2013-12-22 Books & Reviews / Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Salt is one of the four essential ingredients in making bread, along with flour, yeast and water. Nothing more is needed, although often a lot more is added. Salt is listed in all the recipes. Only one bread I’ve ever read about is salt-free (a Tuscan specialty mentioned in William Alexander’s book, 52 Loaves). We tend to assume salt is simply for flavour, but it is also part of our basic biology: I find it easiest to think of salt as one half of the body’s … click below for more ↓

How hot is your oven?

2013-12-22 2013-12-22 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Seems like a silly question: the answer would be it’s as hot as I set it to be. Isn’t it? Well, no, it may actually be rather different from what you expect, based on my recent tests. I was reading on several bread-baking forums about oven temperatures and the effects on baking. Specifically on the crust: higher temperatures (450F and up) lead to crunchy crusts as the sugars caramelize rapidly. Then there’s “non-enzymatic browning:” the Maillard reaction that happens at a range of temperatures: The reactive … click below for more ↓