September 27, 2003

50 (thousand) pounds of flour

I've been organizing the pantry, and one of the side effects of that was to get lots of bins and containers and so forth. One of the bins has been labelled (with my new snazy label maker) "Bread Flour" and so it was that a 50 pound bag of organic bread flour was purchased.

Even I, who normally buy my All Purpose flour in 25 pound bags wasn't quite prepared for just how much flour that is. And so, tomorrow will be bread baking day. I'm going to start a pre-ferment this afternoon, so hopefully I can end up with some pretty decent loaves. I've been doing way less bread baking over the past year than I'd prefer and want to get back into it.

I picked up a really good book Artisan Baking Across America that covers lots of info about Baker's Percentage style bread baking. It's probably not a book for the feint of heart with recipes clocking in at 30 hours or more. Also, for those of us living in the Bay Area, you have to be really serious about bread making to bother with it yourself -- there are just far too many great bakeries out here.

Actually, tomorrow is going to be a cooking all day fun-fest. I'm also BBQing a brisket and doing various chores around the house. This may not sound like fun -- but I've been spending 16 hours a day at work for the past 3 weeks and the idea of being "homemaker" for an entire day appeals.

Posted by dowdy at September 27, 2003 08:33 AM