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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I Made a Coffee Sandwich

...onal, for extra coffee flavor) For the sandwich: 8 slices of Japanese milk bread (or any soft bread of your choice) Butter, softened (for spreading) Instructions: In a mixing bowl, beat the heavy cream with powdered sugar until stiff peaks form. In a small bowl, mix the brewed coffee with the instant coffee granules until dissolved. Then fold this coffee mixture into the whipped cream until well combined. Set aside. Take two slices of Japanese mil...

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Los Angeles Bread Bakers Blog

...k Stambler, California has a cottage food law and Paul is also posting videos of a presentation that took place this weekend on how to get a cottage food permit in Los Angeles. And if you’re in Southern California and interested in learning about bread baking and meeting other bread bakers feel free to join our meetup: http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Bread-Bakers/. LABB is for everyone–amateurs, pros and people who have never baked bread in thei...

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Timing Sourdough Feeding

...hod, I think one factor is important if you want to get a decent sourdough bread: the amount of time between feeding your starter and making your dough. I keep a small amount of starter on hand since I bake, at most, twice a week under normal circumstances (Under quarantine I’m baking a lot more but the reasons for that would be the subject of another blog post). Just before I go to bed, the night before I’m going to make bread, I take a tablespoo...

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Spent Grain Bread–We Brew Econo

...ment, as a flavoring for our wild yeast bread (recipe and instructions for making that bread here—we added 4.5 ounces of the spent grains to the dough–and we just threw them in whole without grinding them up as some folks on the internets suggest). The rich, smoky taste and the dark color these grains imparted to the bread makes us want to brew another batch of beer soon, if just to make bread. The spent grains we didn’t use for bread got fed to t...

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