This is the New York-style rye bread that got me interested in baking bread when I left New York for Minneapolis in 1987. It continues to be very hard to find–pretty much anywhere in the US. Why? It’s too complicated (and for commercial bakeries, expensive) to create the rye sour that defines the taste of […]
Given all the baking I do, you’d think I’d have started using a stand mixer years ago. But believe it or not, I’ve recipe-tested for three books using nothing but a wooden spoon or a Danish dough whisk. Well, I’m tired. So above, my new KitchenAid Professional 600 series, 6-quart capacity stand mixer, which is an […]
The rye flour available in supermarkets is delicious, but it’s whole-grain, and that’s not what I grew up with as a kid. Those rye breads from yesteryear were made from “medium” rye (bran and germ-depleted), and the result was lighter. Bob’s Red Mill and Hodgson Mills rye flours make great breads, but you have to […]
OK, it’s finally 85 degrees in Minneapolis, so we really have to get outside and do everything on the gas grill. Even Swedish Limpa Rye. Here’s how to do it, in a cloche, on the Grill:
Readers have asked why their rye breads and pumpernickels seem to have so much more “whole-grain” character than what they remember from childhood (rye and pumpernickel are pictured here in Mark Luinenburg’s beautiful shot from the book). While whole-grain character is nice, it isn’t the traditional approach to rye breads (at least for those available […]
A hundred years ago, my grandmother came to this country at age 22, having grown up on plain Eastern European fare like beets, cabbage, and potatoes, plus the occasional meat or fish when her family could afford it. Sweet desserts weren’t really in the picture. In America, when others would grab a doughnut to go […]
Philosopher Henry David Thoreau was an environmentalist and early naturalist. In 1845 he built a tiny one-room cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, to experiment with living simply and deliberately. There he grew and gathered his own food and wrote in his journals—living off the grid before there was a grid. […]
It’s been 17 years since I published my first bread cookbook, meaning I’ve spent more than 17 years learning, tweaking, experimenting with, and obsessing about bread. I included many of those discoveries and realizations in the next seven books, but needless to say I’ve thought a lot about what I’d do differently if I had […]
(photo by Mark Luinenburg) Like many people, my wife, Laura, and I live far from family, so this time of year, we’re always reminded that you have to find family wherever you land. Well, we have landed; this is our thirty-sixth year in Minnesota. Over the years we’ve been lucky to be invited for Thanksgiving […]
Readers have been asking me about using einkorn flour in my Master Recipe, and since it’s basically winter in Minnesota (see Halloween picture below), it’s time to bake. Einkorn is a variety of wheat that’s been available in the U.S. for a while. Its flour makes a delicious loaf, and some of you have told […]