Thanks to my wonderful daughter taking over for me, yesterday, we had a couple of fresh loaves of bread to try this morning. I’d started by having the dough baby soak overnight, then added flour to make a sponge. After several hours, this is what the sponge looked like. My daughter set aside half of … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment: awake!
With how hot it’s been all summer, we’ve done no baking at all. It was simply too hot in the house to do baking and heat it up even more! Only recently did my daughter finally start baking some bread again. Which means that our dough baby has been sitting in its flour, unused, for … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment: a re-awakening
A while back, we tried a recipe for overnight bread, which you can read about here, and find a link to the original recipe we used. I then tried an “over day” version, using the dough baby from my Babcia’s bread experiment. It was fantastically successful! We’ve made it again, as a pretty basic no-knead … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 10: No Knead bread
Yesterday, I made another batch of bread using the old dough stored in flour as a starter. I did change things up a little bit, though. One of the things about trying to recreate how my grandmother did this is, I’m relying on my mother’s childhood memories. There would definitely be things my mother never … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 9: a few changes
For the next while, as I remove part of the dough from one batch to use in the next batch, I will be taking out slightly larger pieces of dough, to make larger batches of bread with it, next time. Our flour canister is tall and narrow, so I’ve made a point of flattening the … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 8: ham and cheese roll!
After yesterday morning’s cat disaster, the girls were kind enough to drop their own projects and take over cleaning up. While I was doing my rounds outside, the furry little monsters created another mess. One of the jade plant posts I’d managed to shield from their digging got knocked to the floor. *sigh* I was … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 7: having fun
Okay, so after accidentally killing off our ball of old dough “yeast”, I had to start over. Since I have no idea how my grandmother got her first ball of old dough, this is all a guessing game, anyhow! This time, I went with another old technique: the sponge. It’s just 2 cups warm water, … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 6: restarting
Ah, I was afraid of this. I managed to kill the dough ball. My mother describes how her mother would bake only once a week. So after working using the old dough after letting it sit in the flour few a few days, this time, I left it longer. Last night, I took it out … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part five: I killed it!
Last night, I prepared the dough ball from our previous baking. I was really curious about our bubble! Seeing this reminded me of a story my mother told me, when I was a child, helping her bake bread. There was a young couple and, while the husband was at work, the wife decided to bake … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 4, and baking day!
Our first batch of bread using old dough, in the manner my Babcia used to do, is now done. I did mess up a bit, which I will talk about below. Here is how the dough looked after the first rise. I had left it for about 1 1/2 – 2 hours, give or take. … Continue reading Babcia’s Bread Experiment, part 3c: all done, and where I screwed up
The Re-Farmer 