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The last few weeks have sucked TREMENDOUSLY around here. Good bread is how I cope. In order to stop the current round of chaos that was the wind down for bedtime last night, I offered to the kids that we should mix up dough.

400g flour

2 pinches of yeast

8g salt

300g water

I wanted a wet, tasty dough that would be ready in time for dinner the next day. I woke up today and at 3 or so punched it down and shaped it. A couple hours later I put it in the oven. Half an hour at 425 later, this is what I pulled out of the oven:

House sweet dough

This sweet dough is a mixture of two recipes; The brioche recipe from the Tartine bread book, but with the percentages of butter, eggs, and hydration scaled back to similar percentages as  Richard Bertinet's sweet dough (My favorite yeasted basic sweet dough).   I use this dough for most of my basic sweet dough pastries, some of my favorites are Monkey Bread, Cinnamon Rolls, Orange/lemon sticky buns, fake croissants (in this case with chocolate), Fruit braids, etc. 

After my sourdough boule disaster this past weekend, my bake with baguette a l'ancienne recipe boosted my confidience a smidgen...

and...

and also some crumb...

Last Friday and Saturday, I hopped over to San Mateo for the San Francisco Pen Show to indulge another of my addictions hobbies. We needed a fast breakfast to get an early start. So Thursday I baked ...

Cinnamon-Raisin-Walnut Bread from BBA

Returning Sunday, I activated my sourdough starter and mixed enough levain/biga for ...

These rolls are SD / YW, caramelized onion, sun dried tomato, bacon, parmesan cheese Emperor Rolls with Seeds so they are pretty much not Kaiser rolls or semmels any more.  We forgot to put in the basil but left it in the formula.

Yeah, those are the best two words to describe this weekend's sourdough boule. I prefer to embarrass myself on accident, hence no pictures. I guess every baker is entitled to a few mishaps here and there. I'll get to the points of where I went wrong.

Same recipe as before except:

For my second miche taste test I wanted to do two things: compare King Arthur High-Extraction flour against Central Milling Type 85 Malted, and experiment with a smaller loaf after the comment from one of my tasters that the first loaf was "gummy" (though he ended up liking that loaf the best.) Above is a closeup of the result, with the Central Milling loaf on the left.

I've been a little behind on my blogging; will try and fix that. In the meantime here's an olive levain. Pretty much Hamelman's formula.

On my last two bakes I’ve used the 3-stage Detmolder process from Hamelman’s Bread. I decided I would try to use it with a white sourdough.

3-stage build

Stage 1—Freshening

5 hours at ~78ºF. Room temperature in SW Florida.

For the most important years in a young boy’s life I had the good fortune of living next door to my grandparents—perched high on a hill at the very edge of town. I have so many fond memories of these years—watching storm clouds build in the west, a school holiday spent watercolour painting with my grandfather, piano lessons with my grandmother, summer days spent picking grapes, kippers on toast for breakfast, fig jam and fresh grapefruit.