Xesla Research Organisation

I have been pondering the idea of making a chocolate bread for a while now.   A bit of googling told me that it has in fact been done before.   Reading through David’s recipe I could see it was at heart a faily simple sweet dough / brioche type deal.   Knowing my way around a brioche [...]

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Ruhlman has a post up on his blog called Ciabatta From Scratch which I would have loved to have had two years ago when I started trying to make Ciabatta. The recipe he has up is very similar to how I now make my Ciabatta ( albiet I use sourdough starter and don’t hydrate as [...]

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Usually I make Ciabatta with my sourdough, but have recently been working on making Baguettes. I’ve got a few things I really need to nail down with my bread baking, Working with the dough after the first proof and shaping it properly is currently where I go wrong the most. When making bread I usually [...]

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Recently I’ve had a hankering for some Split Pea Soup, usually something I associate with cold winters days … yet it’s the middle of summer. A few things led me to this urge. I had some ham bones from a ham I’d cured and smoked some time ago in the freezer ( My mother used [...]

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Here’s a good use for the no knead bread,  simply remove a chunk of the dough from the fridge, flour it, and roll it flat. Fill it with pizza toppings such as Chorizo, Pepperoni, Mushrooms, Basil, Mozerella, Capsicum. fold the dough over and seal the edges,  put a sprig of basil on top and drizzle [...]

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I’ve been reading about this no knead bread phenomena that’s been flying around the internets tubes for some months now, and have remained skeptical about it.   I mean,  it’s too easy right?  How can real bread be made without beating the crap out of it to develop the gluten?  it’s crazy talk! Earlier in the [...]

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I’ve been baking bread for quite some time now, and I’ve never been totally happy with the results… until now! I wasn’t meticulous about measuring instead just went for the feel, and I kneaded it for longer than usual. I was making pizza bases, but had an excess of dough, so I rummaged through the [...]

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This is a nice light soup, made slightly heavier by adding meatballs and serving with some yummy cheesy toast on the side. I’ve got a big cooking day tomorrow, so was good to make something nice and simple for dinner. The kitten paws in the background are not for eating.

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