Molotov

And one for me, watch purely for Santa kicking ass:

This is so so gay.

You're not my friend anymore. Just Facebook friends.

Not even Santa kicking ass fixes it?

I'm not listening to that... noise.

And get off my lawn.

Mews wrote:I'm not listening to that... noise.

And get off my lawn.

MY HERO!

Mew, I just had me an epiphany... I just found my excuse to go to NZ. To eat your bread!
I grew up in a bakery, a proper bakery, where I woke up to fresh bread everyday. Dad was trained in Austria since he was 14 or something, and I savoir every chance of eating good bread. I think you could make some darn tootin good bread. /endhijackthread

I make it 5 days a week. It's a good product but eventually, after a few months, you get use to it and it just becomes standard. For example, I would try to take home a loaf a day just to eat with butter, but now I'll bring it home but I won't usually have a slice myself, letting the family eat it instead.

It's a good excuse, but really you'd find better baking Australia; NZ bakeries are shithouse comparative to other countries. It's all mass crap and the NZ population is use to eating soft breads, and not paying for hand made pastries, where our artisan stuff has a really solid crunching crust, it's not as appreciated as it should be. I use to bake 4-5x2 loaves of sour dough for our shops a day, now it's down to 2x2 per day, because it just wasn't selling. Customers would rather go to the commercial baker and get the generic stuff.

I went to the 'top' bakery in Wellington earlier this year; They don't use real butter in their pastries and it shows. The pain au chocolate I had was the texture of being a day old and not flakey. It's sad, because this is the standard that everything else gets held to, so there's no pressure to do better than that.

Mews wrote:It's a good excuse, but really you'd find better baking Australia; NZ bakeries are shithouse comparative to other countries. It's all mass crap and the NZ population is use to eating soft breads, and not paying for hand made pastries, where our artisan stuff has a really solid crunching crust, it's not as appreciated as it should be. I use to bake 4-5x2 loaves of sour dough for our shops a day, now it's down to 2x2 per day, because it just wasn't selling. Customers would rather go to the commercial baker and get the generic stuff.

Oh man, that sucks.

The wife's been baking more and more in recent months (just by hand - we don't have a bread machine) and she went from premix stuff to her own with yeast to having our own sourdough starter.

I can't eat anything other than the sourdough now - the texture and crust of other breads are insipid and unappetizing by comparison. I know what you mean by getting used to it, but every now and then I'm at a BBQ and someone pulls out Coles' White Sliced and I curse myself for not bringing some semolina/spelt from home.

I just can't understand why anyone (short of having terrible dental issues) would want to eat anything else.

Bread from a Bakery > bread that is pre-wrapped in coles etc.

Plus I don't usually eat bread if its 1 day old (Timeist). Otherwise it has to be toasted.

Addicted to tiger roles at the moment.

Your wife sounds awesome Cart. I don't make bread at home (equipment etc etc), but I do bake cakes and make desserts every so often. It's more satisfying that just buying it, which often turns out to be just sugar upon sugar. Just curious to know how she goes about her baking to get the crust (steam?), and how her scoring goes?

And it's just how the scene developed, it's sad that I won't get my dream job in this industry if I stay in NZ, but it's the trade off for living in NZ. If I'm motivated enough then I can bring back some quality skills from Europe if/when I go.

I'm the same Lel, though 2 day old Fruit loaf toast smothered in butter is oh so good.

She was originally throwing ice into a tray below the loaves when she put them in.

More recently she's just putting water in as the oven heats up, before the loaves go in - tbh she experiments a lot without giving any variable much of a chance at repeated efforts

Not sure what you're asking about re: scoring. As far as I know she just uses a big knife and makes deep, diagonal cuts in the top. Took a couple of iterations for her to make the cuts as deeply as she does now though - the end result is much better.

One thing that's tricky is working wholemeal into the sourdough - the bread is good (especially straight out of the oven and still warm), but never gets the kind of rise and fluffiness inside that the white spelt/semolina bread gets. We just put it down to wholemeal being "heavier".

Pretty much with the wholemeal. The yeast burst (when you heat it up) isn't strong enough to really blow it up.

Scoring, marking the top. We use a razor blade for a clean cut, though a sharp knife would be alright, it lets the loaf open up quite nicely. See; http://i.imgur.com/E4uMX.jpg White sourdough with a really nice gringe (the top 'crest').

I haven't done this, but I've read about it online. Put a cast iron pan/dish in the bottom of your oven ~15min before you put in your loaf to heat it up. Right after you put your loaves in, tip half a cup of hot water into the pan and close the door as fast as you can, trapping the steam. Our professional oven has a steam injector, so it sounds like it would emulate this quite well.

After a pretty stressful day at work, to come home and read all this, I am so happy right now.

And now I am sad, for I have no decent bread!

Con wanted me to ask about wholemeal - is there a ratio of wholemeal : white that you'd recommend to keep from having a really dense loaf?

The recipe she's currently using is 4:5 starter to flour, and she's been doing 100% wholemeal flour as well as 50:50 wholemeal/white.

(the starter gets pretty much whatever we feel like feeding it - sometimes white spelt, sometimes white, sometimes wholemeal)

She also wanted to know if you have an opinion on wholemeal spelt (or spelt in general) vs regular flour.

She's all excited that I've met a real life baker.

I've never used spelt, so she has the advantage there with me. I'm only an apprentice still, doing it for less than a year and haven't gotten into the scientific part of it yet. More technique. BUT from what I read online (yay google) it has a weak gluten structure, which means that you don't have to knead your dough as much, hooray for less hand work, and you're probably not getting the form you want; If you don't use loaf tins, which I assume you don't, does your loaf sort of spread out and flatten quite easily? Having a tight form is important to get a robust, shapely end product.

The starters I see online look nothing like the starter I use; Ours is a very doughie consistency where the ones online are like a gooey soup. It's only 65% hydration, to give you an idea. This alters the white:wholemeal ratio, so... *intense math* Try a 2:1.6 ratio White flour:Wholemeal. I'm not exactly sure how this will work because the Mother (starter) has some of it's gluten already eaten, but then spelt has not-as-strong gluten... I'd be interested to see the difference. It sounds like flavour would be wonderful too.