The Irish Brown Bread reminded me of a very lightly sweetened and low fat bran muffin, so I have thought for some time that I should make it as individual muffins rather than as a loaf. This was a success and had the key advantage of cooking faster (18 minutes vs. 50 minutes for the Read More …
This bread is like a larger pocket-less pita bread. It is traditionally made by the Druze on a hemispherical pan placed upside down over a propane burner. A wok turned upside down over a gas burner would be similar. Since I have an electric stove, I set a baking steel over two of the burners Read More …
I have had a sourdough starter for many years, but it had been neglected lately, so I bought a new one from breadtopia.com. It took about a week to rehydrate and build the starter to a useable quantity. So far I have used it as a poolish replacement. I have built it up to be Read More …
This is the version of baguettes that I have been making the most often lately. The starter was from breadtopia.com and I followed their Almost No Knead Baguette recipe except that I substituted 250 g.of the sourdough starter for the poolish in the original recipe. (The sourdough starter has 100% hydration, i.e. equal weights of Read More …
This is a stub. I was making a batch of my standard pizza dough, when I decided to turn it into a baguette to go with shrimp with garlic sauce. My standard pizza dough has 77% hydration, which is too high to form a baguette. After quick internet research I decided to try 65% hydration, Read More …
A focaccia is a flatbread which is like a pizza but thicker and with less of a topping. In a focaccia the emphasis is on the bread, with the topping just an accent to flavor the bread, vs. the focal point of the dish. This version was made with a half recipe from Pizza for Many Read More …
For last night’s birthday feast for Amanda we made these flour tortillas to go with the carne asada. All flour tortillas are made with some solid fat, either the traditional lard or the more modern vegetable shortening. I have a small container of rendered pork fat which I had saved for making ramen broth, Read More …
Since we have quite a lot of blueberries in the house right now, Carol asked me to make a batch of blueberry muffins for breakfast. This version is adapted from Mary Meade’s Country Cookbook, which is a good source for standard mid-20th century Midwestern cuisine, since the author was the longtime food editor of Read More …
One of our granddaughters slept over last night, so that made this morning a good time for a special breakfast, like waffles. One of the nice things about Richmond is that it is easy to get full-fat buttermilk here, and that meant we should have buttermilk waffles. This recipe, adapted from Cook’s Illustrated, makes two Read More …
A few years ago, Carol and I spent 4 very enjoyable days taking baking classes at King Arthur Flour’s baking school in Norwich, VT. One of the classes I took was for baguettes, and this is an adaptation of how we made them in that class. One change is that I baked the baguettes Read More …