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Prehistory: waaaay back in 2007, I was obsessed with making Neapolitan pizza at home--self-clean cycle, quarry tiles, Jeff Varasano. That's where I first learned about autolysing and slow fermentation. And it explains my unhealthy preoccupation with getting the wide open crumb. During this time I also made some nice lemon rolls (from a sticky bun recipe, minus the cinnamon, minus sticky topping, lemon zest in place of cinnamon:

I have been gone from baking and TFL for a LONG while.

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and here's what I've come up with:

Sourdough: A device made from flour and water used for cultivating natural yeast.

Bread: A balloon like device made from usually wheat flour and water used for capturing "yeast farts". 

So based on this definition, bread is a "Yeast Fart Balloon".

Tim

This is a late bake of Hamelman's "BREAD" under levain breads. It is 90% White flour vs. 10% Wholwheat with 230g of Pitted olives.

Hi All,

This past Sunday I was in the book store browsing...where else.. but through the cooking section. One of the books that interested me the most was Richard Bertinet's 'Crust', in particular for some of the unique recipes in it. It also included a DVD of Bertinet demonstrating his techniques for hand mixing and kneading brioche and levain. The book has some very good photography as well and the price was reasonable so I went for it. Mr. Bertinet has been mentioned a fair bit lately on TFL so I was curious to see what I could learn from him.

Another very tasty bread from Dan Lepard's "A Handmade Loaf", I mostly followed the formula, but left out the instant yeast, using rye starter only, which means the bulk rise was 3 to 4 hours at room temp, then shaped and retarded the loaves in the fridge overnight. The next morning, took out, warmed up for 1 hour, then baked.

Hello from highmtnpam. We live at 9200' above sea level with the Continental Divide on three sides of our small town. I love the site because it keeps me in touch with other "breadies" (if you can be a foodie why can't you be a breadie)  I am just learning to post and include pictures but look forward to the challenge.  I consider my self a good baker, but have already learned so much, I feel that I may be on my way to a "very" good baker.   Hello again,  Pam

Hi all,

Here's a brief report on this weekend's baking. Yesterday (Sunday), I mixed dough for a fruit and nut levain and did the lamination for a straight croissant dough. Both the levain and the croissants were retarded overnight after final shaping, so I could bake them off this morning. I got an early start so everything was baked before I headed for work.

Ode to pain de mie