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My vacation has begun... with baking.  I've eyed the Arrowhead Mills Sprouted Wheat Flour for some time and decided it was time to use it.  My attempts here were directed at a solid everyday bread.  No fillers besides the 25% Whole Grain addition.  The dough is quite fantastic.  Very smooth and elastic with great strength.  It was so active and happy at the time of divide/shape I didn't dare proof it at room temp at all and went straight to the retarder for 8 hours (maybe a mistake).  Holy Oven Spring.  

http://vimeo.com/34325967 after watching this video.. inspired me to work with higher hydration confidently. 

my first 85% hydration loaves...

Hello everyone,

Thanks to David for his Pizza Bliss post and the delicious pizza crust formula and method he shared.
Pizza crust has always been a challenge for me and I was very happy to have made this pizza crust!

David's formula made a lot of dough and we ate pizza three nights running - my husband couldn't believe his luck :^)

This was one of the pizzas we enjoyed (Bacon, Potato, Rosemary):
http://m.foodnetwork.com/recipes/453473

I used the SD method, sorry the dabrownman method once again on this one, using 10% organic rye, 10% duram semolina and 5% WW.  All aspects of this bread went together well and I can't wait to taste the results. So I did an overnight autolyse on the whole grain flours @ 100 hydration and another hour of 100

Thank you so much to all of you who gave me some really good advice with making these rolls.

It's only taken me just over a year of disaster after disaster.

I think I now know where I was going wrong.

1) My dough was'nt the right consistency.

2) On the second proofing I left them too long.

3) the covering on the second proofing was too heavy and squashed the rolls down.

4) the oven was on 140c instead of 200c

The only problem I have now is that the rolls are tasting quite bland.

Any ideas please ?

Thank you all again

We took last week's more tame bake and decided to gussie it up some.  There is just no way to hold my apprentice back when it comes to gussieness.  She decided to add some walnuts and re-hydrated black mission figs (one of our favorite combinations for fruit and nuts in bread) and some pumpkin and sunflowers seeds

This weeks bread was Sesame Poppy Seed Sourdough.

We decided at lunch time to have sausages for dinner and needed some buns.  I went to the KA web site to get a recipe for some that would be ready in 6 hours max.  I found a no knead recipe to use as a basis but decided to make a poolish with a pinch of ADY.  We put the whole wheat in the poolish to get it wet as long as possible and put half the honey in the polish too.

 I wanted to make a fairly uncomplicated bread with a good portion of spelt flour and while I was at it I decided to add some walnuts since I love nuts and my new apprentice Max is quite the nut as well.

My wife picked up some chocolate infused olive oil on close-out at William Sonoma so I figured that along with some chocolate vinegar would be a good compliment to the mix of nutty flours along with the walnuts.  I'm not sure you really end up tasting too much chocolate flavor but it did add some nice chocolate undertones to the final bread.

Hi there,

I would appreciate some help with baking rolls.

After shaping them in to balls and then proved they end up as flat as a pancake.

Is there some sort of special baking tin to keep the shape or does anyone know where I am going wrong ?

Thank you in advance