Salt and bread making
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…
Food & drink
How hot is your oven?
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…
Art, Science & Baking
You gotta love breadmaking. It’s an opportunity to get the right and left hemispheres of the brain working together, not racing about in different directions like they do most times.…
What am I doing wrong?
I began a levain last week (Nov 19) and it seemed to go well at first, but then it just seemed to have stopped… or slowed to a crawl. Was…
Doing it by the numbers
The first thing I learned – well, not the first but up there, for sure – is that volume measurements are for amateurs. Being an amateur (and expecting to be…
Road Trip to K2
No, not to the mountain. To the mill. The flour mill in Beeton, a little more than an hour’s drive southeast of me. We took a little road trip today…
Gluten, Sourdough, Fads and Ailments
Gluten, that everyday protein found in many grains, has become the health-fad followers’ most recent evil spectre, and many (one in three, stats show) have jumped onto the anti-gluten bandwagon,…
I’m struggling with this…
My recent passion for bread and baking has caused a bit of an internal upset. Not the baking thereof, but rather the writing about it. I’m doing a lot of…
Bread, Madness and Christianity
The witch craze of Europe is a popular, albeit often misrepresented, part of our collective history. Everyone knows witches were hunted, tortured and often killed – burned at the stake,…
What Bread Would Chaucer Have Eaten?
I was mulling over the growth of the whole ‘artisan bread’ movement as I made another batch of dough last week to cold ferment in the fridge. As I lay…
Bread Tales, Continued
This week I started a small batch of dough to bake later in the week, or on the weekend while I figure out a few details on my baking odyssey…
The New Art of the Old: Baking Artisan Bread
So far, my re-entry into the world of baking bread has gone fairly well. I started rather hesitantly, unsure of the results, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the…
Bread the Old-Fashioned Way
For all the reading, the reviewing and the researching for the best bread maker these past few days, it’s somewhat ironic that instead I turned back to the old-fashioned method…
The Smallest Helper
While I was pondering the nature of flour in my cogitations about bread machines (I’m still debating which model, by the way – suggestions welcome, but local stores have few…
Something so basic, yet so different stands between us
You’d think it should be this easy: just take a bread machine, throw in all the ingredients listed in the recipe, push a button, wait, remove loaf and eat. Yum.…
A Cup of Pu-Erh
It’s dark in the cup, but in the glass pot for brewing, it’s a deep copper. It smells of earth and age, a hint of horses and leather. A rich,…