Baking Bread in Our Kitchen

This month, Len has been trying bread recipes, especially from Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish.
I've mentioned Len's bread in a couple of previous blog posts.

Most recently he made a baguette and a Pain d'Epi (shaped like an ear of wheat).
For shaping these loaves, he used the instructions in Julia Child volume 2.

We enjoyed several round loaves over the past few weeks.

A round loaf is baked in a dutch oven. Because we have a lot of
kitchen stuff, we are trying to use what we already have.
However, we did buy a new spray bottle to add steam during baking.

And we bought a new, better kitchen scale
(shown in front of the older one).

The recipes he's tried so far use a pre-ferment or sponge, using a portion of
the flour and water with a very small amount of yeast that's fermented
for 12 hours or more before adding the rest of the flour, water, and yeast.
He's tried two called biga and poolish, which I wrote about earlier.
* See Baker's Words. *

Another addition to our tools for baking: the dough scraper shown here.

Our extensive collection of tea towels comes in handy for use
holding the dough while it rises.

My tea towels tend to have British themes because my friend Sheila in London sends them to me. Thanks, Sheila!

Here are a few bread-y things we have eaten this month.

We tried making focaccia with part of one batch of dough.
Topped with fennel seeds and sun dried tomatoes, and spread with lots
of olive oil, it tasted very good, though the tomato bits were very dark.

Using up the bread is also a challenge sometimes. One night I stuffed
some carnival squash with bread cubes and various veggies --
essentially the same as sage and onion stuffing for a turkey.

Bread makes good toasted garlic croutons for salad to eat with baked potatoes.
Bread pudding, French toast, and strata will also be on the menu soon.

Then of course there are always sandwiches. And home made bread with butter and jam.

Trader Joe supplies the lemon curd, strawberry jam, and hot pepper jelly
that are currently in my kitchen. I need some Bonne Maman preserves.

That's about it for new activity and a few new gadgets in my kitchen this month. I'll be sharing with other bloggers who routinely post about their kitchens. Sherry at the blog Sherry's Pickings hosts the blogging event called "In My Kitchen This Month." Check it out to see what people have been doing!