Fresh pasta dough

(Found inTexts)
You can use this dough to make lasagne, ravioli, spaghetti, etc. - in fact, any fresh pasta you wish.
December 6^th 2012180 K3.8 1 hour 15 min.

Ali Baba bread

(Found inTextsStages)
This bread is so-called because its magical sesame flavour is non-negotiable! The triple dose comes from tahini (sesame paste), sesame oil added to the dough before kneading, and toasted sesame seeds both in the dough and on top of the loaves. The texture is soft, rather like ciabatta, but with a...
December 10^th 201743 K5 4 hours 25 min.

Chocolate sweetcrust pastry

(Found inTexts)
This simplified sweetcrust pastry gets its chocolate flavour simply from cocoa powder, added towards the end of kneading. Chocolate aficionados will enjoy using this in all sorts of recipes that call for sweetcrust pastry (pâte sablée).
July 4^th 201859 K1 20 min.

Pogne de Romans

(Found inTexts)
Pogne de Romans is a kind of brioche lightly flavoured with orange and rum. It originated in Romans-sur-Isère, a town in south-east France. This recipe dates back to medieval times, when it was made in a ring (or crown) shape to celebrate the end of Lent, as eggs could then be used again. This more...
October 7^th 201882 K 23.3 1 day 17 hours 40 min.

Gâteau Basque

(Found inStages)
This traditional Basque dessert is similar to a gâteau breton (brittany butter cake), but very moist as it is filled with a rum-flavoured confectioner's custard (crème pâtissière, or french pastry cream). This is a fairly simple recipe, though as the dough is fragile and difficult to handle, I...
September 11^th 201866 K4.7 2 hours 55 min.

Benoîton

(Found inStages)
This curious name (explained below) applies to a small bread fingers made with a blend of wheat and rye flour, enriched with raisins and almonds.
February 4^th 201846 K 4 hours 35 min.

Cretan Bread

(Found inStages)
This Cretan (or Cretan-style) bread has a soft dough, enriched with olive oil, preserved tomatoes, green olives and cooked onions.
October 24^th 201782 K4.3 4 hours 30 min.

Jura bread

(Found inStages)
This speciality bread is full of all the character of the Jura: dry white wine (made with Savagnin grapes, of course), diced Comté cheese and toasted walnuts. "Jurassic bread" was is first name... The loaves can be made long, as shown here, or as small rolls. This is ideal as an aperitif snack,...
October 24^th 201759 K4.4 6 hours 9 min.

Saucipain

(Found inStages)
Saucipain (or sausage bread) is a kind of savoury baguette. The dough contains small dice of dry-cured sausage or salami and is mixed with red wine instead of water. Served sliced in rounds, it makes a typically French aperitif snack.
October 24^th 201764 K3.8 4 hours 30 min.

Tomato foccacia

(Found inStages)
Foccacia is an open-textured Italian bread. The French sometimes refer to it as the Italian fougasse. This version is made with preserved tomatoes, green olives and parmesan.
October 24^th 201779 K4.3 4 hours 55 min.

Rum babas

(Found inStages)
Rum baba is a classic French dessert, consisting of a small cake soaked in rum syrup and filled with a little Chantilly (whipped cream).
November 24^th 201396 K3.9 3 hours 35 min.

Naan

(Found inStages)
Naan is a type of Asian bread made from wheat flour. This kind comes from the Punjab region of India.
September 25^th 2011182 K4 3 hours 45 min.

Jam doughnuts

(Found inStages)
These were originally a traditional German treat (Berliner Pfannkuchen in German): big fried doughnuts filled with jam and sprinkled with icing sugar.
May 27^th 2011155 K4.5 4 hours 25 min.

Poitevin twist

(Found inStages)
This short baguette, from the Poitou region of western France is soft-textured, made with walnuts, walnut oil and goat's cheese. As the name suggests, the bread is twisted, rather than slashed, just before it goes into the oven.
December 19^th 201858 K 3 hours 20 min.

Rolled chestnut and apple brioche

(Found inStages)
This rolled brioche is made with a special dough, using a mixture of two flours: ordinary plain flour and chestnut flour. The prepared dough is then rolled up around a filling of apples sautéed with brown sugar.
September 12^th 201850 K 24 15 hours 55 min.

Nantes Tourton

(Found inStages)
The "tourton Nantais" is a sweet loaf from Nantes, somewhere between bread and brioche, but without egg and only a small amount of butter.
September 12^th 201877 K4.3 7 hours 35 min.

Ocean bread

(Found inStages)
The idea for this bread was inspired by an amusing coincidence: the proportion of salt needed for good bread is 35 g of salt per litre of water, which just happens to be the exact concentration of salt in the Atlantic Ocean. So it's possible to make bread using sea water to provide all the salt...
October 24^th 2017169 K 63.8 5 hours 7 min.

Panettone

(Found inStages)
Panettone is a brioche-style Italian loaf, made with dried fruit (raisins and candied peel) and flavoured with left-over citrus fruit. The recipe is a bit complicated but, above all, it takes time, a great deal of time...
April 15^th 2020137 K5 1 day 1 hour 20 min.

Potato galette

(Found inStages)
This potato "cake" is like a big savoury pancake of duchess potatoes (mashed potato with egg yolks), mixed with strips of fried ham, chives and spring onions. The galette is cooked in the oven in a tin and cut into portions for serving. This is delicious on its own or with a good green salad on the...
July 10^th 201956 K 1 hour 15 min.

New leavened bread

(Found inStages)
This new recipe for leavened bread is simple and delicious, but needs rather long resting times. If you'd like more more information about making your own bread, look at this dedicated page.
December 30^th 2019903 K 34.3 7 hours

Making your own bread

You'll find a whole range of bread and pastry recipes on this site, but before you get started, perhaps you'd like to know more about the subject, get some tips and tricks, and find out what the main mistakes beginners make? If so, this page is for you.
August 22^th 2024565 K 63.9

Bread oven

Building a bread oven was until a few years ago a job for the professionals. But now you can buy a kind of kit which allows you to build your own bred oven without professional masonry know-how. You should know that the kits only provide the main part of oven, the hearth, where you light the fire...
October 15^th 20241.16 M3.6

The amateur baker

You may have noticed over the pages of this site, I am passionate about everything that is related to the bakery: I love making bread, pastries, maintain my leaven, etc.. This page contains links to all the different parts of the site where we talk about bread: recipes, special pages, etc.
October 15^th 2024170 K 44.1

A few tips for effective kneading at home

When you have to knead dough for bread or some other recipe, you may well use a food processor or the type of machine known as a stand mixer. The best-known brands are Kenwood and KitchenAid. They are useful tools, but here are a few tips to help you get the best out of them.
June 23^th 2021272 K 23.7

The window-pane test in bread-making

The home bread-makers often ask themselves “Have I kneaded my dough long enough?” . A good question, as dough that is insufficiently kneaded will not rise properly or will fall flat when the top is slashed, which is very frustrating. To know when the dough is ready, one can rely on the length...
June 16^th 202189 K 23.9

The mock CAP baker's certificate exam

The next instalment in my life as an apprentice baker at the French INBP professional school. I’m now halfway through training and it’s still as exciting as ever, and exhausting – but maybe I’m just getting old, or both… Anyway, a few days ago we had to go through the mock CAP exam. A sort...
May 1^st 201817 K4.4

Salt and yeast

Let's take a look at an old baker's legend: You may have already read that somewhere in a recipe that uses baker's yeast(bread, pastries, leavened doughs in general) it is often specified "Don't put salt in contact with the yeast, you'll kill it (the yeast)"! Well, that's a belief, and there are...
March 15^th 201969 K4.3

Baking cakes

Where we see that to put a cake in the oven, once the dough is finished and in its mould, there is no hurry and that the cold is your friend.
June 28^th 201940 K4.1

Stand mixer tools

Whether we call it a stand mixer, food processor, or simply refer to it by brand (Kenwood, KitchenAid, etc.), this machine is a valuable tool for amateur cooks, bakers or pastry chefs like ourselves. All these machines come supplied with 3 different tools. Let’s take a look at their names and...
November 2^nd 201933 K4.5

The French baguette and UNESCO

As you may have already read here or there, France has initiated for some time the procedure to try to have the French baguette classified as an intangible world heritage by UNESCO. When you put it like that, it sounds a bit namby-pamby, and it would be tempting to imagine an American (for...
March 18^th 202011 K4.9

Baking a cake at the right time

When you make a cake, which most likely contains butter, a cake for example, chances are that as soon as the batter is finished, you put it in the pan and bake it immediately. Classic, everyone does it like that, and then if, on top of that, you have a few kids around you who are getting...
April 18^th 202016 K4.5

Pastry and bakery dough families

There are many kinds, or families, of pastry and bakery doughs, depending on whether you want to make a tart, a cake, a pie, a brioche, croissants and so on. I'll try to give you a quick overview of all these doughs, how they're classified, and what they're used for.
November 16^th 20209,5774.9

What happens to the bread when you make it?

This bread that we eat every day, and that our baker makes for us, what happens during its manufacture so that it becomes bread? I will try to answer this question, and to summarize the complex alchemy that takes place.
May 28^th 20219,9984.9

The color of the bread crumb

When you go to buy bread, at your baker's, at the time of the choice, if you hesitate of course, you will undoubtedly be very sensitive to the color of the crust, and you will be right. The color of the crust, from golden, to sometimes very dark, deep brown almost black, depending on the maturity...
April 30^th 202215 K4.6