Apparently it is Real Bread Week. For me, that’s no different from every other week. But to celebrate I embarked, last night, on a repeat of “that dark sour bread” I first tried about a year ago. This time, the whole rye berries are, I hope, softening a bit in the Thermos. It’s a long process, and there probably won’t be too much to see for at least another 24 hours, maybe 36. Still within the week though.
Not everyone is lucky enough to work at home, with the freedom to attend to starters, leavens and dough according to their needs. Here’s an article that goes into huge detail about how to be a better weekend baker.
The one thing I’m thinking of changing in my own schedule is to add one more build after taking my starter out of the fridge. Maybe it will produce a more active leaven.
https://vimeo.com/refugecollective/sfm-woodfiredbaker
Nice little film about a bakery in Australia, gleaned from the excellent Bread Magazine newsletter
Something rather fun popped up on Instagram, while I was admiring other peoples’ breads with something approaching jealousy. An instagrammer called @season_adam announced that he was adopting the #igbreadclub hashtag and building it back to become active and bubbly. 1 The idea is once a month to pick a recipe from the unbeatable Hamelman’s Bread and then “following it, baking it and posting results, in order to widen scope, discover new things, rekindle the old, learn and continue to evolve.”
Just the ticket to force me out of my well-worn tram ruts.
I’m ashamed to say that although I baked a new (to me) bread on Sunday, partly in honour of Monday’s Fornacalia, I’ve not yet found the time to write it up. My friend Dan, though, who recently left Rome to return to England, has done a bang-up job to mark Fornacalia this year. We’re going to have agree to disagree on the potential links between fornax and fornix though, although my scholarship isn’t up to doing anything more than saying, “there has to be a connection”.