How To Bake Pandesal and Other Breads

whenever i get calls regarding breadmaking, i feel like recording everything i say by the time i hang up the phone. seriously, because almost everyone i get to talk to has the same woes, the same ambition and goal, the same dilemma. it is as if i talk to the same person only that the name changes everytime the phone rings. i remember, well, i used to be at the end of the phone a long time ago and i didn't get the answers i wanted, neither did i ever get to call someone who knows baking that much. now that i offer teaching breads at home, i get to listen to so many stories of mostly women who want to bake good breads as a business base. this page is not enough to enumerate their sob stories so i will try to recall the most common ones. the number one common denominator is the problems they encounter with the bakers. one student of mine who owns two bakeries came to me to study cakes. when i asked her why she close her two bakeries she said she went bankcrupt, had to sell the delive...

yesterday, i had a call from a friend of a friend asking me about baking cookies and how to produce them in large scale. i talked to this person for almost two hours, (without my knowledge) explaining to her the mechanics of what goes on in cookie production, from the choice of ingredients to the methods used, and most importantly how to standardize their prized recipes. she wanted to come over so that i could teach her exactly the steps to follow from weighing her recipes to mixing, molding and baking. the problem? i simply could not part with my recipe. over the years, the recipe i used evolved and it took me quite a while testing and retesting different flours to get the right consistency i wanted. so we had a problem there, she didn't want me to see her recipe, i didn't want her to see mine either. i don't know about the others, but maybe because we use a different flour from the ones being used in most baking books, i seldom get a perfect cookie when i try them out. ...

I often laugh and enjoy reminiscing my baking mishaps when i was just starting at age 18. I didn't know anything about baking temperatures, i certainly have never seen an oven thermometer and i have no idea what bain marie means. Looking back, i came a long way from being so ignorant inthe kitchen to being someone who teaches other people how to make bread, of all baked goods. I remember this incident when i tried making cheese muffins from the box. I read the instructions and baked the muffins and was surprised to find every piece perfect and delicious. It was that good that my brother asked me to do another batch for her girlfriend. Proud that somebody asked me to bake them something, i proceeded to do my thing but the muffins turned bad, rock hard. This baking inconsistencies will plague my dream to finally be able to bake goodies that are good batch after batch. I realized that it was an occurring dilemma for every novice bakers, that due to their lack of knowledge in baking sc...