Bread Starter Test

Way back in July (7/21 to be precise) Michael Ruhlman posted about a method of kick starting sourdough starter. The method, which he learned from Carri Thurman of Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska called for the addition of a red cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water.
Both Ruhlman and Thurman, as well [...]

On the Need to Know

I never thought I did an especially good job of leading my students at The Culinary Institute of America to understand that knowing why food behaves in the ways that it does when we manipulate it, is just as important as knowing how to cook. I think at best I probably reinforced the belief [...]

The state of the oven

My aging mind is such a blur of past events that I really don’t remember when Jerl Pino took over the completion of the Tuscan style wood fired oven that Trent Hendricks and I began in September of 2008. The date he took charge doesn’t matter anyway. What’s important is that he took over the [...]

Warning for Substituting Baker

If you bake hearth bread often you may have had this problem:
You decide to substitute a fraction of very coarse flour or cracked or whole grain for processed flour. You add the normal amount of water to the recipe but when you mix the dough it looks too dry so you work in more water. [...]

Yeast Poll Results Reveal Pattern of Bread Doping

What do bread bakers who work from starter, students who pay other people to take tests for them and professional athletes have in common?
Well, from my poll results (look left) it appears that most of them are not above doping their path to success. Of the 22 bakers who respond positively to the statement “I [...]

Yeast Poll Results Reveal Pattern of Bread Doping

What do bread bakers who work from starter, students who pay other people to take tests for them and professional athletes have in common?
Well, from my poll results (look left) it appears that most of them are not above doping their path to success. Of the 22 bakers who respond positively to the statement “I [...]

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

Sublime is the meat from a bull that we butchered today and ridiculous is the bread. Both can be seen in the slideshow below.
The last time I saw anything the color of this meat was in 1980. It was in a small church in the Ticino of Switzerland whose apse was fronted by Doric columns [...]

A Meditation

On The Pernicious Effects of Using Bread Starterfor Leaveningon Quantitative Baking Process Skills
I baked my first loaf of bread when I was sixteen years old. But disallowing for the occasional loaves of brioche, rolls and baguettes that I made over my years of working in restaurants and banquet/catering establishments, I did not [...]

A Meditation

On The Pernicious Effects of Using Bread Starterfor Leaveningon Quantitative Baking Process Skills
I baked my first loaf of bread when I was sixteen years old. But disallowing for the occasional loaves of brioche, rolls and baguettes that I made over my years of working in restaurants and banquet/catering establishments, I did not [...]

Deep Thought: Artisan Bread?

ar·ti·san (ärt′ə zən, -sən)

noun
a worker in a skilled trade; craftsman
Etymology: Fr < It artigiano; ult. < L ars,

It may be only children and pedants who believe that once a word is codified coded into a more than one dictionary its meaning [...]