This week’s bread for the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is Peter Reinhart’s Casatiello. Which I consistently and unashamedly misspelled and mispronounced. It’s the Italian answer to brioche, but with meat and cheese inside. Or, at least, mostly inside… I halved the recipe and converted it to grams. I replaced the yeast with sourdough starter...
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Fahim’s parents have another house in Kurunegala, which is sort of part way between Colombo and Kandy but a bit north of that "highway". At that house, they have a mango tree. It’s only about 15 or 20 feet tall, so still youngish. Those mangoes have a lovely flavour unlike any mangoes I’d ever...
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Here’s another video on shaping loaves. This one demonstrates shaping two French-type loaves and one boule, and the lady who’s demonstrating it, Natalie Greenway, makes it look so incredibly easy. At times, her fingers fly too fast and it’s difficult to see exactly what she’s doing, but with practice and effort, I ought to...
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If you’re like me and having trouble shaping your breads, it might be time to turn to YouTube. Oddly enough, as it might seem to those of you who live in countries with fast Internet, I don’t watch a lot of YouTube videos. Never have. Here, they take too long to download and who...
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It’ll make the bread dough rise faster, right? Right? Uh, no. Not necessarily. Uhn uhn. This all started with my wild yeast (aka sourdough or natural leaven) cinnamon buns. They took forever to rise. Forever being, oh, say, 8-10 hours at 30-35C for a first rise and another 12-14 hours for a second...
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This is the next bread in line for the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge. I was looking forward to making brioche since so many people were huge fans, but since I hadn’t had brioche before, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I cut the recipe in half, converted to grams, then replaced the yeast...
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I’ve never been a bagel person, but given that the only bagels I’ve ever had were from supermarkets or the like in Western Canada, I doubt that I’ve had the best. Perhaps really good bagels will change my mind? No idea, but since bagels were next in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge, I was...
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This gets to the science behind baking bread. If you can make an excellent loaf of bread that turns out exactly as you want it to without knowing anything about bread hydration and baker’s percentages, great! Me? Not so much. I started reading up on it preciesely because my bread wasn’t turning out the...
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We bought these peppers at the grocery store last week, labelled as "Korean Peppers". On Teh InterWebs, I find references and descriptions and photos of Korean peppers with are long and thing, not bulbous and deformed. So I turn to you, dear readers, for help in figuring out just what these are. On the...
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This week’s bread in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge is called Artos and it’s a Greek celebration bread. It’s a spiced-up bread that’s usually served as a boule with a decorative cross over top. There are variations, such as ones that include fruit and nuts. I initially opted for the plain version and made...
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Howdy and welcome to my site! I'm Laurie and I'll be your, er, hostess today. :)
I'm a Canadian expat living in Sri Lanka, been here since 2003 and loving it.
I cook Sri Lankan curries, sambols, and mallungs. I bake bread using wild yeast (sourdough that isn't sour). I bake on the stove. And I experiment wildly.
Life is an adventure. Join me!
If you want to know more about me, click on the "About" link in the navigation bar above. :)
