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Pain au Levain a la Vanille ( sourdough bread with vanilla )

I recently was gifted some beautiful organic vanilla beans. They have been calling to me from my pantry for a few weeks now. I wanted to incorporate them into some sort of bread but couldn't think of something that would pair well with the vanilla bean and still be good in a bread. I decided to let the smell and taste of vanilla to shine through and just use it on its own. 

Shiao-Ping's excellent post on Mr. Nippon's Baguette formula and the images of her crumb and those in the book inspired me. From what I can tell, the 12 hour cool autolyse as a significant effect on the dough. The dough is sticky as Shiao-Ping cautioned and acted differently from any other 75% hydration dough I have worked with. It was trying to wind it's way up the shaft of the dough hook on my DLX mixer for one thing. It was window paining BEFORE kneading.

Well, here it is!  My first ever blog post.  I have been thinking of starting a blog for awhile, if only to keep a catalog of the progress I've made in my bread making over the last year or so.  It is difficult to quantify progress without something down on paper, as it were, so I hope this will be useful for myself and others, being able to look back through recipes and pictures for future reference.  Anyway, I should give some background on my interest in bread baking.  I am an American living in Britain, and was visiting home for a family wedding over a year ago.

This is a recipe that is one of my favourites at the moment. It's a sourdough that is mainly strong white flour, with rye, kamut and a non-white starter providing some background complexity. It's loosely based on a Dan Lepard recipe for a barley bread, although it has no barley in it. This time I used a used a whole wheat stater, but I have also had success with a rye sour. It's quite a simple recipe but I'm pleased with the results.

The ingredients are:

250g whole wheat or rye starter (approx 100% hydration)

300g strong white flour

100g light rye

It was raining outside my tea room.  Polly my dog was happy in her house.  I was in heaven painstakingly (not contradictory in terms) typing the French letters (the annoying à and é and ç) into my on-line translator.  The music was vibrating the thin rice-paper calligraphies on my mahogany-colored wall.

Hi All,

Just want to start out by thanking both MC, and Shiao-Ping for their detailed postings and directions on making the Gérard Rubaud Miche.

Also, since so many people have tried out this method, I figured that I'd try it out too...  And my hand crank grain mill arrived a few days ago, and today was a snow day, so no work...

Because of the snowstorm, I have been housebound since last Friday so what's  better than playing with flour. I have made Pain de Campagne au Levain in many incarnations using different kind of flour mixes, different types of levain, different dough hydrations, so this time I decided to try another variation using basically all high extraction wheat flour.

This was originally posted on my blog Healthy living, you can see more images there but here is the run down of my day baking.

I've been reading a lot lately about Spelt flour. My interest was sparked by a seemingly Spelt flour interest-spike among TFLer's, and that I've never baked with Spelt. I've also been wanting to create a 40% Whole Wheat sandwich sourdough bread. We routinely bake a pan-shaped 40% whole wheat straight dough, we're very happy with; however, I wanted a similar, but free-form baked sourdough primarily for grilled sandwiches.

The other day, as I was in the process of purchasing a book on Amazon when I noticed the "Other people also bought this" feature that was pointing out a book I have wanted to look at for a long time. Brother Juniper's Bread Book by Peter Reinhart is a classic and I think his first published book.

Paging through it today, I am taken by the variety of good looking bread recipes. There isn't a single photo in the book so when I say good looking I mean the recipes look interesting.Reinhart's writing style is clear and easy to follow as is the case in all of his later works.