Category Archives for "Reviews"

What we’ve been doing during Christmas week!

For Christmas week our family went camping on the leeward side of Hawaii, the Kona and Kohala coast. Gee swimming in the warm, aqua blue waters off the coast of Hawaii at the end of December, life is so difficult! 🙂 We went swimming and snorkling as well as hiking. It was fun. We also toured all the way up the coast to the end of highway 270.

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Pendleton Mills Power-High Gluten Flour

I was able to obtain a 50lb bag of Power-High Gluten Flour from Pendleton Mills. Before I came to Hawaii, one of my favorite bread flours to use was the Pendleton Mills Morbread flour. I will have to say that from my experience, Pendleton Mills mills some fantastic flour! However, when I first tried using the Power flour with my formula for testing flours- (see former flour testing posts) I couldn’t use the formula because the gluten amount was so high, it sucked up the water.  Remember that the highter the gluten, the more it absorbs water. This flour is rated around 14% protein content, when many bread flours are from 10 – 12%

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Natural Directions AP Flour Test

Bread made with Natural Directions flour

First, I want to let those of you who have been waiting for the dry starters to be available, know that there are three varieties available now and the rest will follow soon. My son in Texas is drying them and sending them to me, as it is too humid where I am to dry starters.
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They are available at: http://www.northwestsourdough.com/store.html  The fresh starters are still available, although I have not found any rye flour yet to bring back the fresh dough rye starters. They will be available as dry starters soon as well.

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Now on to flour testing:
I found another new flour in the store. It is called Natural Directions and is milled by an exclusively organic flour mill. I used their All Purpose flour for testing because that is what was available, I don’t know if they produce Bread flour. I used this formula, which is the same one I have used for all of the tests:

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Sourdough Breads from the Store

La Brea's French Baguette

La Brea's French Baguette

I couln’t believe it but I found some La Brea Bakery bread in a Hilo store! Not only that , but I found some San Francisco Sourdough bread as well from Raymond’s Bakery. So I bought them and brought them home to see how they compared ( In the last post there was a a contest for a free sourdough. The fourth responder, Patty, is the winner of the Hawaiian Sourdough Starter, please email me with your contact info Patty).

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