During our last trip to Portland I lured my (for good reasons) wary husband to go with me to "Rabelais", with the sanctimonious promise "just wanting to look what's new". Rabelais is cooks' equivalent to an opium den, a famous cookbooks-only store; they carry probably every English language (and several foreign language) cookbook on the market, plus many antique ones. Leafing through all these enticing books, looking at all those mouthwatering photos, leaves the mind boggled and the eyes glazed over...We left the store, I with my broken promise - and Jan Hedh's "Swedish Breads & Pastries" -, and my cautious Richard with a (twice as expensive!) magnificent Vietnamese cookbook.

What had caught my attention in Hedh's book was the leaven used in several Pains au Levain - yeast made of raisins or apples. With all that discreetly fomenting leftover apple yeast water in my fridge - thanks to RonRay - I needed another baking challenge after producing one nice  loaf with this strange homemade yeast. Reading the recipes I was quite astonished to learn that fruit yeast is regularly used by French and Italian (and obviously also some Swedish) bakers as milder sourdough alternative. From Ron's (RonRay) and Akiko's (teteke) discussion on fruit yeast breads I had assumed that this was a (somewhat exotic) Japanese invention!

Following Hedh's recipe I cultivated a "mother" (1. step), "chef" (2. step) and then the levain from about a teaspoonful of apple yeast water. When I placed the Pain au Levain in the oven, it looked to me somewhat flat, and I was a bit concerned about it's oven spring capacities. While we were drinking tea, I kept one eye on the oven. At first the rim rose a bit, the middle seemed to cave in - and then I watched incredulously how my bread started growing a veritable horn!

After some suspenseful minutes the whole loaf began to swell ominously, but fortunately stopped short of exploding.

Pain au Levain from Jan Hedh's "Swedish Bread & Pastry

Holey loaf! Apple Yeast Gone Wild - or only baker's impatience?

The bread tasted great, and even with the large holes, we managed to butter the slices and eat them with Südtiroler Speck and Fontina.

This weekend I gave it another try. With the first loaf I had made the dough with brief kneading and autolyse - whereas Jan Hedh suggests long kneading, at low speed, without autolyse. I wanted to see whether it would make any difference if I used his technique, and, also, whether a longer rise in the banneton would affect the bread's "holeyness".

The first loaf I had made with a whole wheat and rye addition, for the second I wanted to use some leftover kamut. The longer kneaded dough got warm faster than stated in the recipe - the water should have been colder - but I didn't notice the slightest difference in dough consistency or performance to the one I made before. And I like the idea with brief kneading and autolyse much better.

This time I tried to catch the exactly right moment of the optimal rise before placing the bread in the oven. And then I watched and - saw another horn growing, though less pronounced than the first one. And the bread had, again, a very strong oven spring.

Pain au Levain with kamut

So I guess it's really The Power of The Apple Yeast

The kamut version tastes as good as the first bread. And now I'm going to have a slice!

My second batch of pandoros came out very nice as well! I used Glezer's recipe. It was amazing how difficult it was to find cocoa-butter in this town. Especially when you know that Amsterdam is the #1 harbour for shipping the stuff around the world... In certain weather conditions we can smell the coacoa from our balcony, but for buying the cocoa-butter I ended up going out of town to a very old fashioned drugstore in a nearby city. The oddities of globalization, I guess... Anyway. here it is: my second batch of pandoros!

If you want to see more; check my "year in baking"-slideshow here

On X-mas we'll be having a cheese-thingie going on with friends, so I made my first 4 pounder today. It looks quite spectacular I think:

This dough is quite soft, and I forgot to fold it 3x early on in the ferment, so i did one fold and at the end of the 3 hour ferment and hoped for the best. It came out flatter than I wanted, but it did get a substantial oven spring, so I'm  happy.

I made sure that the time between the dough leaving the rising basket (well, more like a bucket in this case, lol) and it going into the oven was minimal, but the dough is so heavy, there's just no keeping it from loosing its shape.

I haven't tasted it yet, it's still cooling. I'll post a pic of the crumb after we cut it at the dinner table

I made a "year in baking"- slideshow; if you would like to see: here it is

greettings from Amsterdam

Freerk

Well, time passed in that way it does and soon I had two loaves ready for the oven: 

I trimmed the parchment paper (which burned to a crisp, by the way, any tips on avoiding that in the future?), wished them well, and gently slid them on the stone. 

Twenty minutes later, I pulled out these: 

As you can see, they were far darker than I'd wanted. The recipe stated they should be a "pale golden," and I got, well, flour-ed brown. They came out crispy enough and the crust had some crackle, and the bottom sounded hollow enough. 

But alas, it wasn't long before they were soft. I wondered if I shouldn't have tried spritzing them or something. 

Still, when it came time for stew, the crumb was ok in the loaf we ate (haven't tried the second one yet), though not as bubbly as I had expected: 

So, that's my ciabatta adventure. I'll definately try again, as I'm a tad disappointed in these loaves. Any tips for next time would be greatly appreciated. 

Not in the mood to spend hours in the kitchen, or feeling confident yet enough to tackle an authentic italian panettone, but want a lovely festive tasty panettone!  Mix it up tonight, bake it tomorrow!  These are festive little Panettone's and perfect for the Christmas Caroler's along with cup of hot coco! 

This is a feature recipe from http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/cherry-almond-panettone-recipe .  I did my version of mixing and ingredients, using fresh potato, pecans, extracts, chocolate, almond paste meringue topping. 

You can mix up the poolish tonight and bake it tomorrow! Instead of using the large mold...I used the small single serve size..I just eyeballed the cuts of dough into 9 perfect for the single serve molds.

                                                        " The Sampler "

                                                           Very light, shreds apart, and moist, melt in the mouth creamy crumb!

                                                 No little elf is going to turn their nose up at these!

                                        Submitted to yeastspotting