French Flour Types: T45 to T110 Explained
Understand French flour types from T45 to T110. Learn what the T number means, which flour to use for bread, pastry, and baguettes, and mistakes to avoid.
Dough Hydration: Handling Sticky, Wet Bread Dough
Learn what dough hydration really means, how to handle wet sticky dough with confidence, and fix the most common mistakes bakers make at high hydration.
Get a Crackly Crust and Oven Spring at Home
Struggling with pale, flat loaves? Learn how steam, heat, and scoring give you a crackly crust and strong oven spring in a home oven, plus fixes for common errors.
Sourdough Starter: Knowing When It’s Ready to Bake
Read your sourdough starter with confidence. Learn the real signs it’s ready, why the float test misleads, and how to revive a sluggish starter fast.
Why Your Bread Is Dense: Fixing a Tight Crumb
Diagnose and fix dense, gummy bread. Learn the real causes of a tight crumb, from underproofing to weak gluten, plus a clear checklist to bake open loaves.
What the Numbers on a Flour Bag Actually Tell You
Flour is the ingredient a bakery lives and dies by, and yet it is the one most home bakers reach for without a second thought. At Boulangerie de la Baie, choosing a flour is closer to choosing a variety of grape than picking a generic pantry staple: two bags that both say “wheat flour” can…
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Scoring Bread: Guiding the Final Rise in the Oven
There is a moment just before a loaf goes into the oven when a single, quick gesture decides how it will look forever. That gesture is scoring, the deliberate cutting of the dough’s surface with a blade. Many home bakers treat it as decoration, a signature slash to make the bread look artisanal. It is…
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How to Store Bread So It Stays Fresh Longer
Learn how to store bread the right way. Match storage to bread type, avoid the fridge trap, and revive stale loaves so your bread stays fresh for days.
Keeping a Loaf Fresh, and Bringing a Stale One Back to Life
A beautiful loaf represents hours of fermentation, shaping, and baking, and yet many people undo all that work in the twelve hours after they carry it home. Bread is perishable in a very specific way, and the mistakes that stale it fastest are usually the ones that feel most sensible. At Boulangerie de la Baie…
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Making Crème Pâtissière That Holds Its Shape and Its Flavour
Behind a great many of the pastries in a French display case sits the same quiet workhorse: crème pâtissière, the vanilla-scented custard the English-speaking world calls pastry cream. It fills éclairs and choux, lines fruit tarts beneath glistening berries, enriches mille-feuille, and forms the base of lighter creams when folded with whipped cream or butter.…
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