Pane francese is italian and means french bread. It is the Italian version of baguette. Having the look of a ciabatta, the crumb is similar to a baguette.
It is a very tasty bread with a rustic look, that contains a small amount of whole wheat flour and such a minimal amount of yeast, that I really doubted that the dough would rise. But never underestimate these small creatures. The long fermentation period give them enough time to proliferate and the bread had a nice oven spring. Continue reading
Another collegue finished her PhD thesis, and today was the great day of her disputation. It is a custom at our university that the new Doctor get a selfmade Doctor-hat, a Doctor-wagon and a Doctor-cake. So I was asked if I could bring a cake, a question I will always answer with yes 😉
I promise to bake some bread for an Easter-Dinner with my parents. It’s been a long time since I baked Baguette, and there are so many nice recipes in “Advanced Bread and Pastry” that I had not to think about what kind of bread I want to bake.
After my 
We do house-sitting at my parents place during the Easter holidays. The weather was fine, so we spend a lot of time in the garden. But free days are not perfect without baking for me. I brought sourdough, seeds and grain from home, my mum has a kitchen machine and a lot of bread pans.
I learned two years ago, that there exist a Easterbread called Colomba, when my italian collegue brought one from Italy after easter holidays with her parents. With this incredibly soft texture of the crumb unter a sugar crust it was one of the delicouse things I ever tested. To sad that my collegue did not bake at all, so she had no recipe for me.
I planed to bake brioche since months. In my new favorite baking book “Advanced Bread and Pastry” I found three diffrent recipes, using no preferment, sponge or prefermented dough. I liked the sponge most because I had not to rember to put the dough into the fridge after one hour.
Somewhere in germany, in the middle of the night: a dark figure sneaks out of the sleeping room and tiptoes into the kitchen. The alarm clock shows three o’clock. In the kitchen, the figure opens quietly cupboards and take out bowls, yeast and flour and prepares a poolish.