Lamp's Blog

haha...soon you will be baking big batches and you will be lucky if you can keep a loaf for yourself. :sad:
Thats the price of success! :lol:

I just cannot stop my loaves exploding and I think you are right Lily, it must be from uneven tension when I form the loaves. I have come to realise though that despite this fault, it does make my loaves have a character all their own. :wink:  One of these days I may learn how to correct what I'm doing but for the moment I'm happy with the texture of the crumb and the taste of the loaves. Spraying the surface of my latest loaf helped, but did not fix the problem. :sad:

I love the look of your white loaves Wet,, that close up shot of the slash looks so good it makes me hungry and could be used in an advert! Nice crumb structure in your loaves too! You will be pleased to know that I have your bag of rye in my kitchen and I might try to drop it off to  Dave tomorrow night (if you email me your address, I might even trek out to your place). The surface of those rye loaves looks weird (Dave hates that flour too), but I'm sure the bread tastes good!

I made a small batch on Saturday evening, making 1 traditional loaf, 1 stick and a few pide breads to have for dinner. I was fairly happy with the results and I'll have to make the pide breads again! :-)

Yes Wet, I stretch and fold my dough about 4 times during the bulk prove, about every 3/4 of an hour to an hour. This is probably less folding than you do but I do notice the dough development during the folding. As for kneading, when the ingreedients are mixed, I knead the dough for about 10 minutes until I feel the change in the dough and it develops a smooth springy texture and is no longer sticky. 

Well, Christmas has come and gone and we had lunch on Christmas eve at my brothers place (Davo) and dinner on Christmas day at my sister May's place. Dave was going to make bread for dinner at May's but on Tuesday se said he was going to be too busy so he asked if I could bake a couple to take along instead

I made some Pide breads to have at Dave's which seemed to go down pretty well and at lunch May asked if I could make some of these to take along to her place as well as the bread.

I made the dough for the white loaves and gave them a longer primary fermentation and a longer prove than I did for the rye blend loaves. As usual the rye loaves turned out well but for probably the first time the white loaves also turned out very well. There was just the right amount of oven spring so the slashes opened up nicely but loaves did not explode. :-) I forgot to take any pictures but my brother in law took a couple so I will try to get one of these to post at a later date. :wink:

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and have a happy new year! :-)