Three Things I’ve Learned About Baking Bread With Whole Grain

...Keep it wet. Whole grain flour soaks up much more water than white flour. Bread recipes are a ratio between flour and water. In bread baking parlance this is called a hydration ratio (to get the hydration ratio you divide the water by the flour–the quirk of baker’s math is that the flour is always 100% ). Old school bread recipes, most of which require a lot of kneading, have hydration ratios in the 65% range. Popular no-knead white bread recipes...

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Learn to Bake Your Own Bread! Fall Classes With Dana Morgan and Linda Preuss

...ed of crappy supermarket bread? Don’t like paying $10 for a loaf of decent bread? How about learning to bake your own bread? I can’t think of any better teachers than my friends Dana Morgan and Linda Preuss. They have three classes coming up: October 22 Tartine-Style Sourdough—30% Whole Grain November 12 100% Whole Grain Breads—Blending Varietal Grains December 10 Baking with Spelt—100% Spelt Breads If that’s not enough incentive, each class break...

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Quick Breads

..., and we’re back to making sourdough. That being said, an occasional quick bread ain’t a bad thing: Quick breads are easy, involve no yeast or rising times, and are nearly foolproof, . [Erik here speaking in 2020: This is an incredibly offensive and stupid remark. I apologize. It’s the worst kind of cheap humor. It’s a humor not based on experience but, instead, just making fun of other people based on where they live. It smacks of classism and el...

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Timing Sourdough Feeding

.... For exact recipes and techniques I highly recommend the book Josey Baker Bread (library link). What I like about Josey’s book is that it’s kind of like a class in bread baking. He starts you out with simple loaves and then gets into more advanced techniques. There’s plenty of illustrations on top of the fact that Josey is a really nice dude (I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him). If you’re interested in the details of my starter method I did a v...

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