Sourdough Rye Bread Class at the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano

..., you’ll take home a loaf to bake in your oven. You can’t buy this kind of bread so you better learn how to bake it yourself! By baking bread at home, you’re in charge of what goes into every loaf and can choose to incorporate local and organic ingredients. Other benefits of baking at home include using less energy (used in harvesting, processing, and shipping store-bought bread), using less plastic packaging, and spending less money. Become a bak...

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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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Timing Sourdough Feeding

...to bake I pull the dough out of the refrigerator and put it straight into a 475º F (246º C) oven. So, in total, my bread baking process takes 2 days. You have to think ahead but there actually isn’t much work involved since I’m using a no-knead method. Again, it’s not the only way to make sourdough bread but I’ve found this method works well for me. For exact recipes and techniques I highly recommend the book Josey Baker Bread (library link). What...

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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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