I am always somehow astonished at how much people love just baked bread.
When I had Mistress Augustine’s on a Friday and Saturday night we always baked two lots of bread. One just before service and one during, the second round slow proving in the coolroom.
One night I dropped a tray of the second, mid-service batch on the floor and was brought to a levelling point with a bitter complaint from an elderly Italian who had been brought in for dinner by his children. He was very angry that we had run out of bread, and when I explained that I had dropped a tray and that it took time to recover making a new batch during service he was unimpressed.
“You could have picked it up from the floor, you were baking, and no one would have known”. Holy shit. he may have been right, but I wasn’t up for something going wrong and the health department being called in.
There’s only one thing to remember about yeast baking…there is no specific timeline. When a recipe says doubled, get a texta and mark your bowl and be patient.
Many of our bread recipes are the generous recipes of others. In particular, New York baker Jim Lahey, the late Greg Malouf and others. Sure oer the years they may have been tweaked ever so slightly, but without their base recipes we would have never got to the end road.
Click on the left image below to go straight to the recipe. There is so much more to come, at least another half a dozen recipes.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
The exploration of yeast takes more than one lifetime, probably more than three. I have been cooking professionally for forty five years and I know I will never reach the end.
With yeast comes so many memories of cooks I have loved and respected, and only a few of them professional chefs or bakers.
If I ever make piroski, the late Mrs Rozenberg’s recipe I caress the dough and remember her words. “The dough must feel like a little baby’s bottom.” The truth is I know nothing about a baby’s bottom, but I can guess from her wonderful dough.
Ben Shewry [Attica Melbourne], in his recent book “Uses for Obsession” railed against anyone using his recipes. I find this frankly ridiculous. Every one of my recipes has its root in a recipe from someone else, and I do my best to honour that by keeping their name on the recipe.
We have 42 years history at the highest level
in the food and wine industry and the passion for our craft remains undiminished…
read more