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Having the rye starter all pampered and fired up, I wanted to bake some filling rye breads this weekend.

I had some leftover sweet potatoes from dinner the other night and after refreshing my starter I decided it was time to concoct something new and different.

We haven’t made SD ciabatta in a long time and wanted to make one that included some YW in the levain, had some semolina, rye and WWW for flavor while using mostly AP and a little bread flour for the rest of the dry.  We added some VWG to up the gluten of this dough and improve its crumb.  We also took some of our standard pizza dough ingredients; the mix of herbs, garlic and sun dried tomato and added them with some chia seeds.

I had a really rough start trying to get wild yeast to colonize on everything from a bag of NoName All Purpose to grinding some wheat berries into a rough flour with a spice blender; I think I've tried every starter recipe out there including a few from books.  I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong so I sent off a SASE and cleaned the fridge of my other experiments when "Carl" arrived.

home for the summer means 2 lunch sammys every day.  Something to look forward to!  One was semolina SD with brie, chicken and pepper jack grilled cheese with home made Dijon mustard.  Made another batch of mustard today but it tales 6 weeks to mature - not that it lasted that long :-(  The other sammy has two different SD and YW starters mixed in the same bread but each slice is a different variety.  It is served with our vapor aged white cheddar and pepper jack Mac and Cheese that is modestly flavored with Thai red curry paste.

Today I baked the bread as described on this blog:

http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/07/08/my-new-favorite-sourdough/

I fed my starter yesterday evening, and it had more than doubled in volume this morning. After a quick trip to the local reform store, or "Ekoplaza" as this store is called, for some whole rye flour, I started the dough following the instructions. Made half of the recipe, opting to bake two 500 gram breads. 

Hello everyone,
Franko very kindly told me about a baking textbook that was available for sale online: On Baking
(authors Sarah Labensky, Priscilla Martel, Klaus Tenbergen and Eddie Van Damme).

Not drawing as long a titular bow as you might think! These two master craftsmen have much in common.

I've been wanting to try my hand at making Phil's 100% Whole Wheat Desem bread since it sounded so simple but yet so good.  I had started preparing the Desem starter a while ago but had to abandon it when I went away for business.  I was not thrilled with the way it was turning out anyway so it wasn't a great loss.