Indian Potato Stuffed Flatbread
A lot of people are baking sourdough bread for the first time because of Covid-19 stay-at-home orders. Meanwhile, near-empty baking aisles in grocery stores are giving new and experienced bakers alike the challenge of substituting different flours into recipes they want to follow. Here are some tips and tricks for new and not-so-new bread bakers.
In 2022 we completed the installation of a large solar power array allowing us to generate 100% of our electricity needs with sustainable solar power.
We evaluate whether the robust, often complex, sourdough starter refreshing protocol of most home bakers actually results in a better loaf of bread than using a small amount of cold, essentially neglected starter.
We experiment with “double scoring” which is a technique meant to increase the “bloom” (or opening) of the loaf during baking. With this technique you score normally before the dough goes into the oven, and then again 5-7 minutes into the bake.
In this experiment we explore the characteristics of sprouted flour with some real-world baking. We made two NY Deli Rye Breads, one with regular rye flour and one with sprouted rye flour and compared their fermentation speed, oven spring, crumb, and flavor.
Experimentation on how different sourdough starters can affect the appearance and flavor of sourdough bread.
Homemade gnocchi are pillowy soft and they showcase the flavor of potatoes in a fun dumpling-pasta format. Try them with our tasty garlic scape pesto recipe or any sauce of your choosing, including simple butter and herbs. This recipe serves six or more so feel free to freeze some of the uncooked gnocchi and the extra pesto.
This black rye bread has a delicious sweet-and-sour flavor with citrus and licorice notes. It’s soft, chewy, and wonderfully dense — perfect to eat solo, with butter or cheese, alongside soups or as part of a delicious sandwich. The recipe is Breadtopia’s take on The Rye Baker’s Lithuanian black rye bread or “juoda ruginė duona,” using toasted sprouted rye flour instead of red rye malt.
Kanelbullar are Swedish cinnamon buns made with a cardamom-spiced dough and twisted into knots rather than rolls. The cardamom and cinnamon combination is absolutely delicious and they tend to be a bit less sweet than American cinnamon buns even before icing is factored in. We experimented with making these buns using sourdough versus instant yeast, as well as 100% whole grain flours versus 25% whole grain flour and 75% all purpose flour. The results were delicious across the board but indeed quite different.
Luke Peterson and A-Frame Farm is the definition of the kind of farmer / operation that we believe is the future of regenerative agriculture and sustainable food production.
Ben Penner started his organic farm in Belle Plaine, MN in 2011 after a career in academic publishing with the idea that local, organic wheat flour was a huge missing link in the sustainable food chain. His farm’s mission is to inspire human flourishing through agriculture and he works to fulfill that mission through experimentation with production practices such as no-till and cover crops and by developing local markets for new organic products on 80 acres of rented land in Belle Plaine, LeSueur and Henderson, MN.
This is a great recipe to make, and later enjoy, with kids. Adapted from The Smitten Kitchen’s recipe, based on Nancy Silverton’s Pastries from the La Brea Bakery.
Once your bread has risen the requisite 40 days and 40 nights (actually only 18 hours – but no matter what you call it, for those of us with a short attention span, it’s: Still. A. Long. Time.), you are supposed to beat it into submission, or at least spread it out with floured fingers …
Ever notice that you seem to get a more open crumb with smaller loaves? In this series of experiments, we made large batches of dough and then divided them into differently sized and shaped loaves while otherwise striving to treat them as close to identically as we could to see how these size and shaping differences affect the resulting crumb.
Barbari bread is a traditional Persian flatbread with an extra crispy crust from a special glaze as well as tasty sesame and nigella seeds. Try this version with the added flavors of sourdough fermentation and khorasan wheat or turkey red whole grain flours.
Our Favorite Bread Quotes “There is not a thing that is more positive than bread.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky “Good bread is the most fundamentally satisfying of all foods; and good bread with fresh butter, the greatest of feasts.” – James Beard “How can a nation be great if their bread tastes like kleenex?” – Julia Childs …
Tom Luhrs has been one of Breadtopia’s principal suppliers of heirloom wheats since 2018. The Luhrs Family Farm is located on the High Plains of western Nebraska with rich silt loam soils known to produce some of the best quality grain and pulse crops in the world.
A bunch of our all-time favorite bread baking books in no particular order.
Milled Fresh — Our turkey red whole grain flour is milled fresh upon order, using grain organically grown by family-owned farms that are committed to ideals of sustainable stewardship of our natural resources for those of future generations. We use granite stone mills and mill at low temperature within a day or two of shipping …
An exploration into the viability of freezing sourdough leavened bread dough at various stages in the process of making bread.
This experiment looks at shaping dough earlier versus later in the rising process. The goal is to assess the impact on crumb, loaf height, and score bloom of ending the bulk fermentation at different points on the fermentation (dough rising) curve. The total fermentation of the two doughs is the same, but one dough has a shorter bulk fermentation and a longer final proof and the other a longer bulk fermentation and shorter final proof.
Baking bread successfully with lower-gluten, heritage and ancient grains usually requires some adjustments to your process and ingredients. This post details how to achieve an open crumb and good oven spring with these more challenging grains.
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