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Here's my story about changing my house bread because of wanting to share olive oil.

We brought back 10 litres of freshly-pressed olive oil from a press in my parents' home town in Italy, and we wanted to share it with friends.  Not having enough small flip-top bottles in the house, I bought some beer for the resealable bottles.  I don't drink beer, so I thought I'd use it up making some bread.  I was cautious, going 50-50 beer-water on my house bread formula.

This bread is problably a classic, everybody seems to love it. And how comes one not to? I usually try to bake and eat more whole wheat breads, but this bread is hard to resist to. I followed the recipe "by the book", with 10 hours retard in the fridge, baking them directly from the fridge, and I suspect both breads were just a little bit underproofed. Probably an hour at room temperature would have been a better thing to do.

Well, thanks all for helping me get the new starter to a point where I could bake with it again!

Forgive me. I have strayed from the unending pursuit of the platonic ideal in bread baking, and have had some fun. 

Hi, not sure if these photo's will work.

I just made the best loaf of my life :) this time the thing which made it work so well, I think, was being more patient.

I went to the shops when it was proving, I had found a nice warm spot in the boiler cupboard for it to sit and I let it stay there for an hour or so, just ignored it really.

Then I kneaded it for about 8 minutes or so, making sure I put in as little flour as I could, so the dough remained lovely and soft and springy.

I'm a product of the great depression and saw many ways of saving money.  Mother Nature supplied most of what we needed on the farm.  One winter the sourdough died.  Dad took us to see Grandma and get a share of her starter.  It was brought home on a hot water bottle and wrapped in a sweater lest it get too cold and die.

That was in 1938 and as far as I know it is still going strong.  I'm starting my own sourdough now.  I have been retired over 20 years and been baking just as a hobby.  Hope the sourdough is as good as mother made. 

Note:  6/13/2011  To make good crust and flavor for a baguette, especially in summer, I really watch out for the dough temperature more than the time and roomtemperature.

I pulled together in one recipe from my post of Amazing airy baguette that I posted before http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/22286/amazing-airy-holey-baguettes 

This bread is based on the light rye formula in "Bread", however, I skipped commercial yeast, and added cumin and orange for a middle-eastern-ish flavor. The pin-wheel shaping method was from wildyeast's blog here: http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2011/05/05/shaping-a-pinwheel/

Light Rye with Cumin and Orange

*Makes 2X700g loaves

- Levain

medium rye flour, 136g

water, 108g

I found this recipe in Dan Lepard’s Exceptional Cake cookbook. Given that it was book about cake, I didn’t expect to see baked goods with yeast in there, especially not for the dish called Krantz Cake.

Apparently (quoting Dan Lepard) yeast cake is a feature of German baking. I was curious to find out how yeast leavened cake would be     different from baking powder or soda.