Hi form Pennsylvania Dutch Country
Hi. Just want to introduce myself. I'm Warren and I've been trying to learn how to bake bread for about 30 years. My efforts got a good push about two years ago when my son paid my way to one of the King Arthur professional classes. I enjoyed that so much, I attended the 2nd class as well where I met James MacGuire and learned about no-knead baking. This isn't like the threads that have been passing around, but involves folding the dough every 20 minutes for an hour, and then letting the dough rest for 2.5 hours. They you're off and running. I credit James, and not myself, but there is not a bakery my side of Philadelphia that has better baguettes. The system just works so well. Since then, I've experimented with some more recipes using the "no-knead" method, and all turn out great :)
My second love is writing computer code, and as a practice tool, I set up a recipe web site. All my bread recipes are posted there, including the no-knead formulas. You can find the bread recipes at http://www.recipesonrails.com/tags/bread . Sometimes I use my own shortcuts, so feel free to ask if something doesn't make sense. BTW, please feel free to post any recipes you'd like to share.
Every Christmas Eve day, I bake about 50 loaves of bread to distribute to friends and family. Christmas Eve, my son and I go on what we call the "Reindeer Run" covering about 110 miles still warm delivering bread. Each year is a different bread, so.... I'm on the hunt for something new for this year :)
Here's a picture of my no-knead focaccia:
How fortunate are your friends and family!! I'm a bit astounded..50 loaves in a day ? Even 50 mini-loaves sounds daunting without a professional kitchen! How do you do it? Your foccacia looks great and I am off to check out your site.
;) Truth be told, about 20 years ago, I did have a restaurant, and when I moved on, I kept the 20 Qt. Hobart mixer. It's made all those Reindeer Runs possible. I start early in the morning, and do about 8 8-loaf batches. I usually get close to finishing around 3:00 - 3:30 and start delivering shortly before nightfall.
Just saw that Sweet Corn Raisin Bread posted here. Might do some experimenting tomorrow ;)
Welcome,. I am quite new to this site also.
I have a big smile on my face imagining your reindeer run...here is southern mexico we have the alacran (scorpion) sprint...but I dont think we are talking about the same type of experience.
I am now going to you site to oggle your recipes, thanks for posting the site info
So I take it Recipes on Rails is built w/ Ruby on Rails? How do you like it? I've tinkered w/ Ruby on Rails a little but find that I still think in PHP, not Ruby. It is cool though.
Also would you mind if I add your bread rss feed into The Bread Feed? That should drive more folks your way.
Right. It was a tool for us to use to learn Ruby. We like it and it's pretty flexible. Personally, (remember I said I've been baking bread for 30 years), it's getting harder for me to learn new languages. I started out with dBase II, went to FoxPro, Visual FoxPro, VB, PHP, and now Ruby. all self taught. I find cooking to be very similar to writing code.... need to foresee where you're going, and have the right ingredients...
Anyway, RecipesOnRails (ROR as we call it) has been fun, and we have a bunch of new ideas for it. Fridays is our ROR day when we try to set aside time to do new things. Yesterday we added support gravatar and of course, the site is down for an upgrade so we have blank boxes showing up. We're working on a weight/volume conversion tool, and then menu planning...
And yes, please feel free to add anything we have there....
Floyd,
Could you send me an email? I'd like to chat and I don't see a PM function on the forum.