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I recently chanced upon an interesting recipe in the excellent Baecker Suepke's blog.

It is for a Black Forest chocolate cherry sourdough bread. The Modernist Bread version springs to mind, but the Black Forest one is different - not sweet, apart from the cherries - and it has toasted sunflower and pumpkin seeds. I also added some non-salted pistachio seed, which gave a rather nice contrasting green colour.

The full text of the recipe is here: https://www.theperfectloaf.com/beginners-sourdough-bread/

But, in summary: 

Dan has organized another community extravaganza and already, there are some beautiful loaves posted.

First build Thursday night; had lots of 100% hydration rye starter, so used that, which most certainly affected the finished loaves. Fed 12g at 1:2:2.

Friday morning, realized that I was out of bulgur/buckwheat, which I'd meant to use in place of the cracked rye, which I can't find here (matter of fact, finding "cracked" anything is a bit of a challenge). So did the second build (1:1:1) and retarded it until I could get the marketing done.

the good and the U-G-L-Y my alibi is that the batard banneton didn't have a liner and the dough had mucho

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I was in a big-box food-service warehouse, and picked up a big bag of Grain Craft Power Flour ($11/25 lb). It is a commercial pizza flour, and I was aiming to increase the amount of whole grain flour/meal in my PdC without compromising volume. Another option would have been to add vital wheat gluten, but the pizza flour is easier, and we sometimes like commercial style pizza and bagels.

The purpose of this post is to reinforce that folks shouldn't just assume one levain will act like all, or even any other differing hydration or composition levain.

Yes, I know it is supposed to be a 5 grain levain but I wanted to add a variety of grains and seeds, and since we are pretty flexible with the rules, I used 8 grains (counting flax and oats as grains) and 2 types of seeds. I also adjusted the hydration upwards to be able to mix the flour, water, Levain part of the dough and then add the seed soaker at the end of the mixing time in a KitchenAid mixer. I also always make a bit more levain due to  loss from being stuck to the walls of the container so that’s why I am starting with 70 g rather than 45.

I had some leftover 125% Levain from Hamelman’s 5 Grain Levain (or 8 grain in my case) and I didn’t want to throw it out. I figured out a quick 1-2-3 recipe but the amount came out to be too much for my batard banneton. 

So what to do? I could use my bigger round bannetons but that means that I have to dig out my larger cast iron pots to bake the loaves and just didn’t feel like doing that. So I thought that I’ll use a loaf pan. 

I have very little experience working with white flour. There’re two reasons why I used so much white flour in this bake. The first is to stay true to the community bake’s formula. The second is to suit the palate of most people as I’ll give this loaf away to my aunts.

25% Spelt Multi-Seeds Sourdough

recipe by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou's book.  Inspired by Abe & Carole I had a go at this yesterday whilst making my 5 grain levain for the community bake.

Starter was refreshed the day before and in the evening I built the levain - 100% hydration with some bran included and left it overnight on the bench. 

Bake day was crazy - visitors in and out and bread on the go.