Craig Ponsford Bakes Whole Wheat Ciabatta

...ut this and with good reason. As he puts it, when he hears about someone’s bread disaster, 99% of the time it’s because they did not use a scale. Rather than dust flour on work surfaces in order to handle dough you’ll see Ponsford use water instead. He also wets containers that he puts dough into. It’s a lot neater and less flour gets incorporated in the dough. Whole wheat doughs need to be wet. When he does use flour, as in the end of the video h...

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047 Done is Better Than Perfect

...Hoop houses Crawl space vents for hoop houses Foraging for garlic mustard Bread Earth and Fire ebook Decluttering Beekeeping Honeybeesuite.com Mite treatment Keeping bees in the winter Mudsongs.org That Flow Hive thingy Bears! Birdhouses No-knead bread in a slow cooker Slow cooking and pressure cooking What to do with pallets If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmai...

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Shoemaking Advice?

...reason every kitchen seemed to have a decorative plaque made of lacquered bread dough. The subject matter was usually a mushroom, or a cluster of mushrooms. Sometimes an owl. More rarely a Holly Hobby-type figure. Here endeth the lesson.) Free People actually seems like a fine book. It basically steps you through making one basic type of shoe that you can modify in different ways. Erik wailed about the horrible hippie-ness of it all when I showed...

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Our Rocket Stove

...dered making a cob oven, a mud domed wood fired oven in which you can cook bread and pizza. There’s a trend in the eco-world to build cob ovens and we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours before a cob oven gets hot enough to cook in. Also, where would we get th...

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Choosing the Perfect Tortilla Press

...s. The last step is to heat them on the stove for one minute on each side. Making your own masa from scratch is much harder (I tried it once for tamales and found that it’s a job best outsourced). But you can bet I’ve bought my last supermarket corn tortilla. From now on they’ll be made in our own cast iron press. Update: One of the members of the LA Bread Bakers, Gloria, put her vote in for the traditional wood press. Cooks Illustrated Magazine a...

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