Its all about the bread!

Balmoral Park Farm Kitchen has really come into being because of the bread and my desire to achieve perfection in baking sourdough bread. I have filed in my memory bank a quote from someone I admired, I cant remember who it was!! who said they were going to devote their retirement to baking the perfect loaf of bread. I thought this was a pretty worthy goal and that I would emulate it!
It quite quickly became apparent that in the pursuit of sourdough perfection we were going to end up with a lot of bread! Far too much bread for two people to eat. Added to that I found some beautiful local, stoneground  flour https://www.facebook.com/artisangrainsau/ and while it is a very reasonable price it adds considerably to the cost of my experimentation. 
So I thought I would explore the possibility of selling some of the bread. Now I live in a fairly isolated, small, rural community, you can count the number of cars that go down our road each day on your fingers! Having just left a working life where I spent many hours every week in my car I am not prepared to deliver, so I was not sure if there were enough people in our community who would drive out here to pick up bread. It seems there are and we are in business. I get to bake many more loaves of bread each week and I can see the improvements all the time. I also have the opportunity to try new recipes and ideas.  My bibles are Sarah Owens Sourdough books and Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilie Raffa. I love trying new ideas. Today I am baking a Brooklyn Loaf from Sarah Owens Sourdough. The ingredients dont change much but small changes in method make huge differences. My kitchen scales are invaluable in this process. 

Finished Loaves

Starter

Proofing Dough

The flour

Shaped and Scored


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