It took us about 10 years of baking bread and experimenting to get to the point that we know success is imminent. Let me show you why we dare to make that statement:
It almost looks like the real thing and it actually tastes like the real thing. Over the years we now and then discovered something that made a big difference to our bread making. Let me describe the important ones:
- We bough a Zojirushi bread maker. Suddenly, bread recipes that always became heavy compact loafs for us, became light and double the volume! For some reason(s) which we are still guessing at, this machine does the kneading and rising process much better than we can.
- Sourdough. We have been experimenting with our "self-caught" sourdough and discovered the familiar taste but never much of the rising abilities so we stopped using it. Recently, Michele aboard Reach gave us a cup of her San Francisco sourdough starter and everything changed. Get a good sourdough! We understand you can order this from places like Amazon.com. We have put a cup of starter in the freezer so that we can restart when an accident ruins our "fridge copy".
- No water. We keep a cup of sourdough starter in the fridge which we only feed with flour and water, but for breads like this rye bread, we use beer instead of water. In fact, we use Guinness beer for dark breads.
- No loaf pan. The best tasting bread is baked in the oven without using a pan. We form the loaf and bake it on top of a special silicone mat which we put on the cookie sheet.
We are now baking breads as fast as we can eat them to refine and distill our favorite recipe. When we get there, I will surely post it here with photo's of course! Until then, here is a picture showing this loaf just before I put it in the oven:
ciao!
Nick & Josie.
Don't forget we're available for taste-testing as you refine your recipe :)
Posted by: Michele & Mark | 02 January 2012 at 21:36