To improve my homemade bread, I built a DIY proofing box using an Arduino Uno as the microcontroller, and a string of Christmas lights as the heat source.
Oat Bread Revisited
I have been baking bread for a long time, but never with a great amount of intensity (though during one period in the 90s I was baking frequently and had a personal “bread museum” that chronicled my efforts). In the early years, general cookbooks like The New Laurel’s Kitchen were my teacher, but their basic […]
Using Arduino in Bread Making at Home
“Let rise at room temperature” is a common instruction in bread recipes, with “room temperature” being around 70 °F (21.1 °C). For reasons that include San Francisco’s famous fog, this temperature can be hard to find in my apartment in Berkeley, California, and so my bread dough sometimes rises far too slowly. One day, I […]
A Piece of the Gold Rush, Fresh from the Oven
(Corrected below, 6/5/10; Updated, 12/26/16, fixed broken links) When you bite into a piece of bread from San Francisco’s Boudin Bakery, you’re biting a piece of the Gold Rush. Founded in 1849 at the beginning of the Gold Rush, the San Francisco bakery has been baking bread since then using essentially the same sourdough starter […]
The No-Knead Bread Recipe Saved My Complicated Sourdough Bread
Last weekend, my complicated, high-maintenance bread baking project was saved by the ultra-simple no-knead recipe. After a week of messy twice-daily sourdough starter refreshing, I was ready to bake some naturally-leavened bread. Although my past loaves have been lackluster – dense and a bit too sticky – I hoped that this time it would be […]