Now is a great time to make some bread!

"All of my friends are very aware of how much I love baking bread. Recently with the COVID-19 pandemic that is keeping a lot of people at home, many have reached out to me asking for tips of where to start. 

Here are two of my favorite videos from YouTube that should inspire anyone:

The recipe is available online, basically:

• 450g strong (bread) flour
• 7g salt
• 290ml water
• 5g fresh yeast (or generous pinch dried yeast)

This is from Alex which is a great YouTuber, who actually published a 4-part series on his "Sourdough Bread Odyssey"

Enjoy some bread 🥖 😀
-Matt

Great bread article

I highly recommend reading this article by Claire Saffitz.

Four more years of baking...

It's been a busy four years

Though I've still enjoyed baking (almost) every Saturday.

I've been working on perfecting my techniques

Finding new equipment

And experimenting with new results!

But most of all I've enjoyed teaching my daughters

Who are showing great promise!

Announcement

Hello blog followers!  You may have noticed that my updates have slowed down in the recent months... this is a natural outcome of it being incredibly hard to post to Blogger quickly on my phone since the amazing Posterous was shut down.

For now I am shifting my weekly bread photo posts to Twitter and Google+ and when I have great things to say about bread recipes I will post it here.

Enjoy some bread :)

-Matt

Patterns

Sometimes I use paper towels to proof the final loaves. Here is the result. 

Enjoy some bread :)

- Matt

Tartine Bakery

Here is another good reference to the Tartine Bakery and Chad Robertson's recipie I've been experimenting with recently. 

http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/rising-star-chad-robertson-of-san-franciscos-tartine-bakery-cafe/

Enjoy your week and try baking some bread :)

   -Matt

Variables

At a family gathering this weekend I was happy to discover that a cousin-in-law of mine also likes to bake. It was great to get caught-up with him and to trade tips and techniques for the art. 

One of the items that I mentioned was that there are quite a few non-recipe variables in-play with bread making that you have to keep in-mind:

1) kitchen temperature 

2) water temperature 

3) rise times

4) "liveliness" of the yeast (though this one is hard to measure) or amount of yeast (easier to quantify)

I recommended to him that if you keep the tempatures and times roughtly the same each week the one variable that is key to isolate and experiment is the liveliness of the yeast. It's isually best to adjust the amounts of starter you use each week and then subjectively score how the loaves turn out. 

Enjoy some bread!

    -Matt