Apricot, Lavender, and Walnut Sourdough + 2016 Saveur Awards

35 Comments read Specialty Ingredient
Apricot, Lavender, and Walnut Sourdough + 2016 Saveur Awards

As you may have caught on my Instagram feed last week I was totally shocked and honored to find out The Perfect Loaf won both Editors’ Choice and Readers’ Choice for The Food Obsessive award in the 2016 Saveur Blog Awards! In addition, I met some incredibly talented and passionate people at the event in New York City — so passionate I could have probably talked with them for weeks upon weeks about food, cooking and baking. A huge thanks goes out to everyone who nominated, voted and supported this site (and me) — I really can’t convey enough thanks. And congratulations to all the other nominees and winners!

Now back to sourdough! I recently had an opportunity to attend a lavender event at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm, a local farm here in the heart of Albuquerque, New Mexico. They offered a small glimpse of their lavender fields, organic farming practices and an introduction to their growing lavender distillation process. The lavender grown on the farm is not culinary lavender, it’s actually only used for cosmetics (essential oils, lotion, etc.), but it was incredibly interesting to see how they follow sustainable growing practices throughout the farm and produce so much local lavender each year. Continue reading →

Multigrain Spelt Sourdough

64 Comments read Ancient Grain, Fresh Milled Flour
Multigrain Spelt Sourdough

This is the second spelt recipe I’ve posted here, mostly because I am transfixed with the flavor of spelt, but also because I developed this formula for a short article I wrote that will appear in the Bread Baker’s Guild of America Bread Lines magazine early next year.  The article has some background information on me, my process, and my motivation for baking sourdough — most of which if you’ve read my entries for a while you already know. I went into how I started baking, how both the scientific and artisanal processes captivate me each and every bake and how baking not only reminds me of my childhood growing up in an Italian restaurant but also because good, healthy food really just requires time.

So why another spelt recipe? When thinking about the article I went back and forth on what recipe to include, swaying between a few sourdough recipes I’ve been experimenting with and some of my old tried-and-true favorites. I knew I wanted to use one that had fresh milled flour and without a doubt my previous spelt sourdough recipe is among my most favorite; but I wanted to take it a bit further. I began to think about what things I’d change if I was looking to try and improve it and I decided to start with that formula as a base and rove from there, to explore and find something that really struck my palette as different or something that produced a substantial structural difference — or perhaps both.

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Whole Grain Peach, Blueberry and Lavender Sourdough Galette

29 Comments read Other Food, Starter Recipes
Whole Grain Peach, Blueberry and Lavender Sourdough Galette

Lately I’ve been creatively working my sourdough starter into baked goods around my kitchen. It started with my desire to reduce the “waste”1 of feeding my starter one to two times per day and eventually I began to fully realize the significant amount of flavor in that fermented flour mixture. You can find my recipes for sourdough pancakes, banana bread and waffles but this is my first mention of a dessert with sourdough in the crust and it’s fantastic. This whole grain crust is everything you want in a pie or galette crust: buttery, tender, flaky and packed with flavor.

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  1. As I’ve mentioned in the past we can’t really look at it as waste since it is actually food used to keep our culture alive!↩

Frequently Asked Sourdough Starter Questions

209 Comments read FAQs, Starter
Frequently Asked Sourdough Starter Questions

First some news about The Perfect Loaf:

I can hardly believe it but my website has been nominated as a finalist in the 7th annual Saveur Blog Awards! I’m a finalist in the “The Food Obsessive” category (yea, I think it fits!) — sites dedicated to a single, focused topic. Thank you so much to everyone who nominated this website, it truly means a lot to me and to be among some of the top blogs out there is an honor.

Update: The Perfect Loaf won both the Readers’ Choice and Editors’ choice award for The Food Obsessive!

Your sourdough starter —  a mixture of yeast and bacteria (the good kind) that co-exist to naturally leaven bread, add complex flavors, aid in digestion and unlock health benefits — it’s no wonder it quickly becomes part of your family1. I’ve been maintaining mine for many years now, but really it’s nothing mystical or magical, it’s a culture I give nourishment (flour + water)  and in return it happily does work for me without even realizing it.

I’ve been compiling this list of frequently asked sourdough starter questions for almost as long as this website has been around. Each time I receive an email or comment asking a question about what I do in a particular situation, I’ve saved it away and have added the most commonly asked questions below. This page is an on-going compilation of the most asked questions and as such it will be updated frequently with new entries as they come in.

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  1. Mine is aptly named Brutus after the trouble it gave me creating it in the beginning↩

Fifty-Fifty Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

136 Comments read Beginner, Whole Grain
Fifty-Fifty Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread

I’ve been thinking about this recipe for some time and I’ve been tinkering with it for just about as long. I wanted to create a whole wheat sourdough bread that wasn’t all the way 100% whole grain, but still enough to bring out that assertive wheat flavor, gentle yet complex sourness, and also one that packs a nutritious punch. I wanted it to be light in the hand, soft of texture and for it to be a good starting place for those who might not have had much experience with breads boasting a majority of whole grains. Sort of a beginner’s sourdough recipe but with more whole grains than not — a fifty-fifty whole wheat sourdough bread to get you and your family on the whole-grain-train without them missing the characteristics of white flour1.

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  1. Usually breads with a significant amount of white flour are lighter, more open and loftier↩