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I made a simple French Bread yesterday. I didn't use a pre-ferment or anything: I actually wanted to experiment with long knead times and see just how much of a difference in taste and volume it made. Something just didn't see right with my dough. It felt tight and, although moist, kind of puckered up.

After I tasted it it was obvious what was wrong: I added much too much salt.  Almost double.  The crumb still wasn't too bad:

I baked a couple loaves of French Bread and a Whole Wheat Loaf today: 

The French Bread turned out very good.  I used a poolish and autolyse, then when I went out for a hike this morning I popped the dough in the fridge so it had an extra slow, long rise. It always seems to help.

We're leaving town today to visit our youngest daughter and son-in-law for their birthdays.  One of the requests was "Could Dad bring some bread?"  So Dad got busy and baked some sourdough bread from the King Arthur cookbook.  I tweaked the recipe by substituting 2 cups of rye for some of the AP flour.  I also made a batch of sourdough english muffins as well.  Picture below:

i went through a lot of recepies,

i find some words like sponge, poolish and sourdough being repeated quite often will some one enlighten me on the meaning  of these words and the purpose it serves,

hi,

im from indiaand this is a fabulous site.

i had given up on baking bread after a lot of unsuccessful attempts

but this is the first time i could actually do it and tasted good.

the crust was a bit too brown.. i guess i kept it in the oven for  a bit too long.

how do i know that the bread is done from inside and also is not too hard/ brown onthe outside.

also i need to know what the measurements of a standard loaf tin are.

i have a small one 22 cm* 7* 7 cms.

Well, here goes:

In case you are thinking that there is no way that particular sequence of dots can be connected, stay with me. You may want to send for the nice men in the white coats when I'm done explaining, but until then, think of it as a case study in aberrant psychology.

I've been passionately lurking on this site for a few months now. I have baked up a few dozen loaves and have been meaning to start up my baker-blog but never could get the stars to line up with a lovely loaf, my digital camera, AND the motivation to write down what I've done. I figured this is the easiest way to get my own personal ball rolling so without further ado, my impressions of the Fibrament baking stone.

http://www.bakingstone.com/

World Bread Day is coming up. On my birthday, October 16th, in fact.

Last year I baked a pumpkin french bread for it.

I may have to try that again, because it was good.