Hi, there!

I've been watching all this great content about bread making and have long wanted to participate in the discussions. I have been interested in baking bread for a long time and had taken some commercial bread making classes back in the Philippines, as well as some personal lessons from my old aunt who is a nun. It has best remained as a hobby for me till I got to Singapore where I wet my feet again. The Fresh Loaf site is quite inspiring and I have shared your site with some of my officemates. And yes, they get surprised that a guy like me is into baking.

Artisan flours are a bit hard to come by here except for some Gold Medal and Bob's Red Mill varieties and an occasional Waitrose strong bread flour from Down Under. The locally-milled flours do not perform as well specially with the extremely hot weather here.  

I've been trying out recipes from Reinhart, Bertinet and Berenbaum. Here are a few of my recent attempts - Bertinet's Guinness Loaf (w/o the Aniseed), Berenbaum's Flaxseed and White Sandwich Bread. I hope you enjoy these photos.

Cheers

I picked up a bag of Bob's Red Mill 5-Grain Cereal (oats, wheat, barely, flaxseed, etc.) at the store today, thinking I would add it to some dough for a bit of texture and taste.  Now that I have it home, I'm wondering, should I just add a bit of it as is, in place of the flour, or should I make a soaker with it?  I've made one recipe with a soaker and have just begun substituting rye or whole wheat for the bread flour in recipes, so this is kind of new to me.  Any thoughts?

This is my second ever sourdough attempt. The recipe is adapted from Susan from the  Wild Yeast Blog and converted to use with sourdough. Here are the modifications I made:

• Instead of making the poolish, I made a 100% hydration levain from my stiff WW sourdough starter to equal the amount of poolish. 
• Skipped the yeast called for in the final dough.
• Fermented for 2hrs at ~75deg F, folding at 30, 60 and 120min.
• Retarded in fridge overnight (~8hrs).
• Took dough out of the fridge and let it warm up for ~1hr before shaping.
• proofed for ~2hrs. 
• I also halved the recipe. 

And here are the results:

They tasted divine! I do think 1. I over fermented (the dough had almost tripled in volume while i slept =P ) and 2. I handled the dough a little too much during shaping. Hence the lack of big holes like Susan's.  But the texture is still light, and I've happily eaten them as is, with honey, with cheese spreads, with soup, and in a sandwich. Very versatile bread!

Ah, my images are blurry and pixely -- they're taken with the iSight camera on my macbook pro. Sigh.... I must be the last person on earth (well, maybe the last person on the internet is more accurate) without a digital camera...

I made the following for Bread Baking Day (BBD) #09: Bread With Oats

In the past couple of weeks we were having problems with fuses blowing on our oven; it's fixed now and ever since the oven has been working beautifully. BUT. I think the oven is now hotter than it was. I know that I used to be able to be quite casual about checking the bread after the bell rang 30 minutes after putting it in the oven. I used to take it out at 35 minutes and it would still not be quite ready. Or perhaps it's the honey content in the dough that makes the crust get so dark. Perhaps I should bake this bread at 375F instead of 400F. As a result, this bread does look awfully dark. But inside, it is as wonderful as ever.

• recipe for multigrain bread made with seeds, cornmeal, oatmeal, buckwheat, rye and wheat flours