Crumbshots

Homemade lasagne, which went down a treat with the masses :

and I know it’s culturally incongruous, but I couldn’t resist having it with a little of today’s batch of chilli jelly…

Using some fantastic bread flour that my other miller friend John gave me, I tried a new recipe today. It was based on a technique from Dan Lepard which involved making a roux first, and then using that in the bread. The result is the softest bread we’ve ever made! This batch [...]

Here’s the my first attempt at fruit loaf. Regular olive bread recipe, with 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice (we are in America after all), and half a cup each of raisins, dried cranberries and dried cherries. It made great toast but needed to be a touch sweeter to eat plain. So the plan is [...]

This morning’s spelt loaf :

which we’re planning to eat with our homemade lemon curd :

or today’s batch of apply jelly (Bonza apples were $6/box at the markets on Friday!)

Epi and soup for dinner.  We tried sticking balls of dough together as an alternate epi.  It worked so well we did it again later.  Patrick has named it hepi, for hexagonal epi.

The hepi was made by making little balls, with a backbone of course, and putting them together on the tray.  They pull apart [...]

Lots of pizza with lots of stuff.  The only problem seems to be we can’t make enough!  We’re getting good at spinning though.

We reduced the hydration back to 65% as the dough seems way too wet otherwise.  Much better result with big holes in the finished loaf.  Something is still going wrong though.  For the first time ever I had “uncooked” bits of dough in the loaf, and it wouldn’t brown again.  The starter went very active [...]

This batch was bulk fermented between 8am and 3.30pm today, with the dough folded over onto itself every hour or so. It was very bouncy and resilient when it came time to shape at 3.30pm.

And here’s the crumbshot!

My friend Kevin, miller par excellence, spotted me a bag of his bread flour. Gorgeous, creamy coloured flour, produced the most velvety of doughs that was a real pleasure to work with. This batch kneaded briefly and left to bulk ferment overnight, then shaped and baked this morning.

Cookies made by hand rather than using the mixer.  It always fascinates me how much of baking is in the process rather than the ingredients.  Mixing these cookies by hand gave a really nice result, slightly different from my usual cookies, and definitely more consistent across the batch.