Sour Rye with Caraway (from The Back Home Bakery)

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I’m a very big fan of rye breads and one of the primary reasons I got into bread making was to make this style of bread. Early on in my quests for good “deli” style rye, I came across a recipe that Mark from the Back Home Bakery  in Kalispell, Montana had posted on his website along with a few other recipes. He has at this point removed those recipes (I ran across them literally two days before the removal deadline) since he was moving his operation up in scale and set up a real live bakery in his house. If you want to see what a small artisan bakery is like, be sure to drop over to his site at TheBackHomeBakery.com. And if you’re lucky enough to live near Kalispell, you can visit his booth at the Whitefish Farmer’s market on weekends and get fresh (made that very morning!) baked goodness.

(NOTE: Mark has since closed the Back Home Bakery and moved his operations to the Bozeman, Montana area and set up his new “Sinclair’s Bakery” workspace in a gorgeous, custom built bakery-mobile trailer, very impressively put together, drool-worthy in fact – if bakery set ups impress you. Be sure to check out Mark’s online space on Facebook.)

Continue reading “Sour Rye with Caraway (from The Back Home Bakery)”

Sourdough: More than ‘San Fransisco’ style bread

When you say you make sourdough bread, people in this end of the world (that’s North America, seems Europeans are more aware) tend to immediately think you mean “San Fransisco style bread” with it’s distinctive acidic tang, crispy crust and somewhat chewy crumb with irregular holes throughout.


Bread from San Francisco’s Boudin Sourdough Bakery

Well, that’s ONE kind of sour dough but hardly the only one, all sorts of breads from very subtle to very tangy to sweet breads can be made with sourdough. That’s because sourdough isn’t a particular style of bread, it’s a technique.

“Sourdough” doesn’t specifically refer to sour dough or tangy, acidic flavour. The term sour here means “fermented” or cultured, as it does in sour cream or sauerkraut. Continue reading “Sourdough: More than ‘San Fransisco’ style bread”

Growing Up: Moving from starter to bread

Once you’re ready to make actual bread from your starter, which means it’s doubling or tripling in 3 to 8 hours, you’ll want to bump up the amount of starter you have.

For this lesson, we’ll assume that your main or “Mother” starter is active and you’ve seen it double or triple in size after each feed for about two weeks – in other words, you’re confident it’s good, strong and active – and now store it in the fridge and feed it once a week (or will do so next).

Just as a good example:

Let’s say you’re making Continue reading “Growing Up: Moving from starter to bread”