Tangled Web

A leaven is more resilient than some people think.
If you keep it in the fridge then, ideally, you should refresh it every so often, e.g. every 7 days or so. However, you can neglect it for longer: just take off any yukky looking skin which may have formed, and spoon out a bit from underneath.
To [...]

This recipe is similar to the one I posted earlier, but has no maple syrup or oil.  The amount makes around 22-24 which fit my fridge and oven in two batches and last my children around a lunchtime’s worth for a week, and a few extra when they are cooling.
It’s very forgiving in terms of [...]

The joys of hosting my own wordpress blog is that the Spammers see it as fair game and managed to completely use up all my webspace, and make this site crash. Hopefully it is now more protected against this menace with an Akismet plugin, and I’ll keep an eye on it to see how it’s [...]

This conversation on The Fresh Loaf made me smile. Someone had misread a suggestion that starter should smell like beer, and thought it should smell like bear.

I found out today that baking Soda is not baking powder, it’s bicarbonate of soda. Oops, I’ve been making my english muffins with the wrong thing. I’ll use bicarb next time and see whether I can spot the difference. That got me thinking…I can appreciate that an “english muffin” is so called in the U.S. [...]

My order from Shipton mill arrived today. I haven’t used their flour before: my normal shop stocks Dove’s Farm and some Bacheldre, but I wanted to try some french baguette flour.  It’s not something I’ve seen at any shops I use in my neck of the woods, so online ordering seemed ideal. Unfortunately, unless you [...]

While I was kneading the very stiff  bagel dough yesterday, I had a flashback to when I first started baking my own bread, as a student in Manchester, in the 1980s. The recipe was from a book bought from Blackstones books, near Piccadilli. The bread did  taste very nice, but was as solid and heavy [...]