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Hello,
Today's bake was an experiment with multigrain, to see the difference between baking in a cold dutch oven, versus baking on my firebrick baking stone.
I've seen so many successful dutch oven bakes here on TFL - I wanted to give it a try!

The result: Very tasty! if not exactly pretty.
The baking stone loaf rose up an extra 1/2" compared to the 'cold dutch oven' loaf, which spread out more & didn't have as much oven spring/bloom from scoring.
Other variables: shaping was harder for the dutch oven loaf (fighting a sticky dough), and the dutch oven loaf was baked at a slightly lower temperature.

Crumb shot is from the 'cold dutch oven' loaf. The bottom loaf was baked on the baking stone.

I tasted a heavenly sourdough bread with sunflower, poppy and flax seeds this past week - I wanted to try and recreate that flavor - so this is the combination of seeds I used for this multigrain. The sunflower seeds were not toasted prior to soaking.

Weights, in grams, for two big boules:

There will be friends, there will be skiing, there will be beer... there should be pretzels.

The recipe from Local Breads yielded beautiful results - highly recommended.  No mention of  an egg wash in the recipe, but I added one just to pretty them up.  A lump of WW sourdough starter went in too, just because it was there and in need of a home.  I can't wait for another occasion to bake these.  Does Tuesday qualify as an occasion?

Marcus

While spending time in the kitchen stretching and folding tomorrow's bread, I made a scone cake with some of my frozen cranberries and candied orange peel.  This is a variation on a recipe I have posted Here.     I used the same recipe exchanging the lemon zest for a cup of mixed, candied orange peel, and whole fresh frozen cranberries.  I tossed the cranberries and orange peel in a small amount, apx. 1 TBsp. flour before folding them into the mixed batter.  I like a scone cake shaping because it's attractive, whole or sliced and keeps well, with the added plus of less handling, which makes for a lovely tender moist crumb.  I baked this one about 8 minutes longer because of the added frozen cranberries.

Can someone find a monistery in Italy with a bakery that needs to be restored. ??

Who would like to go with me ??

I would like to put back some bran and wheat germ into my white flour bread recipes.  Does anyone know what that translates to in terms of additional water per cup of flour?

Couldn't help but want to share this link from "I Can Has Cheezburger"  Lolcat bread pic.... On to my raisin bread, which turned out pretty good.  I used Winter White Wheat, red wheat is simply to strong flavored for making a good cinnamon bread.  I like the red wheat for my cereal bread though!  The darkness of the crumb is mostly from the cinnamon that went into the dough.

I did not soak the flour at all with this recipes, simply ground it and made it into the bread.  I used kefir (basically a lot like buttermilk), and the only other changes I made to the recipe was to use pecans, splenda for the cinnamon swirl and honey in the actual bread.  Oh, I also reduced the percentage of raisin in the recipe by half.  Not sure why the baker's percentage asked for so much, but it seemed rather outrageous.  Here's the dough after the kneading it for about 4 minutes.

At this point I added the pecans and raisins, and kneaded for a few minutes, which worked ok, but I decided to do a little hand kneading before I let it rise, just to mix them in a little better.  I then greased up a container for the dough to do it's bulk rise in.

It actually looks pretty good in there, and I'm starting to think this will turn out to be a nice loaf.

Starting to rise a little bit, a little bit slower than I expected, but I think I used active dry yeast rather than my instant yeast. 

Took about 2 hours, but it's now risen well and ready to be shaped into a loaf of bread.  This is 1.8 lbs of bread dough.

I flattened the dough with my hands, trying not to eliminated all the bubbles, but wanting the texture to be like a sandwich loaf.  The gluten was really well developed, so this was easy but took two steps.  It needed a few minutes to rest before finishing flattening it.

Here it is with the cinnamon and splenda, plus a small amount of flour with a spray or two of water on top to hold it all in place.

All rolled up, ready for it's final proof.  It's looking pretty good, but I think I should have made a little bit more dough for this loaf.  I thought it was 2 lbs, but when I looked back it was actually about 1.8 lbs at the most.

I took two pictures of my finished bread, in different lighting conditions, because of the speculation about why the BBA book's picture was so different.  I am thinking that these last pictures will show what a difference simple lighting and camera position can make, but I also did not cook my bread for a full 40 minutes like BBA called for.  I do not like really dark crusts, so tend to pull them or cover them with foil if I think they are not quite done. 

Hi my brother sent me this video link, there is some amazing looking dough in it, and loads of wonderful types of food.

Enjoy

Reading through SylviaH's long blog (Oven-Steaming My New Favorite Way) I decided that I have to give this steaming technique a try.

I always felt uncomfortable with spraying my hot oven and I don't know how many times I burnt myself in pouring water on the hot bottom. Even though it is still working I believe I've done a lot of damage to the oven and this is probably also the source of all the issues I have with it not holding the temperature correctly.

Like others I was pretty amazed with the result!

The oven spring was so strong that I had blow-outs in my baguettes.

I don't think this happened because of poor shaping. (I'm Sinclair trained!  The Back Home Bakery) On the other hand it shows nicely how big irregular holes in the crumb are created and that scoring plays a big role.

Of course a very strong sourdough starter is very helpful too!!

Happy baking!

Thomas

www.tssaweber.com/WP

Thank you, Karin, for a wonderful formula!  A Keeper!

My first attempt at working with 100% spelt flour.  

I baked this bread yesterday before rushing out for the day.  It works great for a busy schedule and I could have even taken less time by not over proofing it, I'll know better next time after reading, other members advice about mixing and proofing spelt flour breads.  The 'my' crumb was to dense but the flavor is outstanding,  I loved the spices and nut combo...oh and the buttermilk!  

I finally found 2 photos, that's another story!

ADDED:  My husband had it toasted this morning, detected something he really liked in the flavor...ahhhh, I told him anise and fennel.  He's usually doesn't comment about whole grain breads to much..he said he really liked this bread...now that's something!

Sylvia

I was inspired by JMonkey's bread from 2008 & from another bread I tried from Mike Avery's blog.  This bread was absolutely delicious.  I used my usual recipe for my sourdough boules with a 7-grain soaker so I wouldn't feel so guilty feeding it to my family.  I added 50 grams of Dutch cocoa, 100g of dried cranberries, and chocolate chips, folding it in the way JMOnkey showed so the chocolate wouldn't burn.  Worked fantastic.