Tangled Web

As you may have guessed, bagels are a mainstay of my bread making repetoire. I normally use an all sour dough recipe, but as a change, decided on a commercial yeast based recipe from the Bread Baker’s Apprentice book. Alas, it was not a great success.
The dough itself was wetter than I’m used to in [...]

You’ll get as many ways of keeping a leaven/starter as people you ask. My regime varies according to how often I bake. Currently, I’m baking on average around twice a week, so my leaven hasn’t  needed regrigeration for a while.
The guidelines I work with are that a wheat leaven will need refrigeration if you aren’t [...]

Very seasonal this, with it being Good Friday. I’d never made hot cross buns before but fancied the idea of a sourdough recipe I saw on The Fresh Loaf, and the author’s blog here.
I pretty much followed the recipe as-is, apart from no milk powder (I used a bit of milk instead for the water). [...]

This was based on a recipe posted by Zeb on the Dan Lepard forum, which itself is based on Jeffrey Hamelman’s linseed and rye bread in ‘Bread A Baker’s book of Techniques and Recipes’.
It is totally and utterly delicious and very more-ish: quite the nicest seeded bread I’ve ever made or tasted, so it’s being [...]

Trying out the Shipton Mill ciabatta flour today, with a recipe from Crust which uses a biga. It has turned out well, I think: crusty, but with a softer crumb than I get when using strong flour.
I hand mixed it, but the biga was so dry that it didn’t mix very easily with the rest [...]

My leaven hasn’t been in the fridge for quite some time now, and it’s wonderfully active. It makes me wonder if I’ll ever need commercial yeast again. The trouble with this is that it has become a challenge to bake more and more, and not waste any of the leaven. I will have to steel [...]

Same sourdough recipe, but I used more rye starter (220g rye: 220g wheat) this time, as an experiment. The taste is just perceptible, to me, but hardly there and it has affected the colour a bit. I like them! If anybody is worried about baking bagels because it sounds a bit complicated with all the [...]

Trying an all sour-dough recipe this time, based on a recipe as posted on the Dan Lepard forum by Dom.
440g starter at 100% hydration*
170g water
550g strong white flour
35g oil
20g maple syrup
15g salt
* I used 350g wheat + 90g rye, as I didn’t quite have enough ready of just wheat.
<edited: I ‘ve added a slight bit [...]

Recently, I’ve been using the recipe from Andrew Whitley’s Bread Matters for my sourdough bread. However, for a change, thought I’d have a go at the recipe in Richard Bertinet’s Crust book.
I didn’t have any spelt left (typical, I’ve had some in the cupboard for ages, use it all, then a recipe comes along which [...]

It was quite late in the day, but some bread was needed for the lunch boxes, so I was planning on starting some baguettes then retarding them overnight in the fridge for baking first thing. The recipe was for autolyse method baguettes from the R.Bertinet Crust book. I’d done these a couple of times and [...]