Josey Baker on Bread: Whole, Wild, Wet, Slow and Bold

...r big advantage is that, due to the lactic acid producing bacteria in wild bread cultures, your bread will last a lot longer–up to a week in my experience. Lastly, though it hasn’t yet been proven, there may be some health advantages to wild starters. The lactic acid bacterias might make bread more digestible. Wet Both Baker and Miller mix up doughs that are surprisingly wet. Whole grain soaks up a lot of water to begin with, but both Baker and Mi...

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Solar Oven Triumph: Fluffy Egg Strata

...he melted butter, the herbs, the salt n’ pepper. Pour the egg mix over the bread. Let it soak in. The bread might float a bit before it takes enough water aboard to sink. You should have pretty good coverage of the bread. A little poking above the eggs is fine. The bread needs time to soak so it really breaks down. The magical thing about strata is that the bread and egg and cheese meld into one, creating a magical new substance if given a chance....

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Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...t you can skip the beer making and just use malted grains directly in your bread. The grains used in making beer are, mostly, barley that has been malted (sprouted) and then either caramelized or roasted. To make beer you soak the grains in warm water to extract the sugars that form in the malting process. Fermenting that sugary malt water creates alcohol. Most of the grain used to make beer is two or six-row malt. You add so-called “specialty” gr...

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What Epuipment Do You Need to Bake Bread?

...ecessary work to produce loaves that looked to me like squishy supermarket bread. The ingredients you need to make bread are elemental in their simplicity: water, flour and salt and you can make a perfectly good loaf of bread with no equipment at all. But there are a few inexpensive pieces of equipment I like to use: 1. A digital Scale Measuring flour and water by volume is so inaccurate that both of the professional bakers I took classes with las...

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An Easy and Healthy 100% Whole Rye Bread Recipe

I’m a huge fan of making your own rye bread. Why? The rye bread you get at the market ain’t rye bread. It might have a bit of rye in it but it’s also got a lot of other stuff: often white flour, caramel coloring, dough conditioners and preservatives. This recipe that I often teach as a class, has a lot going for it: It’s 100% whole rye. Whole grains, as most of you know, are much better for you than white flour. Nothing has been removed and no st...

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