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These are my first baguettes, ever! I am so glad with how they turned out especially that they were not baked in an oven. I feel that it is a real accomplishment in my baking; I thought baguettes were impossible to bake in my clay pot, but I just defied that today. Perhaps the only impossible clay pot bakes are breads that cannot be flipped like a pizza but if it can be flipped, I can handle it! :)

That Lucy is a pistol.  She has been working very hard for weeks on her app to replace every job people do, just like Silicon Valley is doing, thinking they were going to beat her to it and the next thing you know she stopped working on that, thank goodness, and started working on her new even more important app.

I love making bread but until now haven't had much success with sourdough. I think I've "cracked" it now - the flavor and texture is pretty good but it's cracking on top. I'm using the no knead method, mixing the dough the night before, folding in the morning (can be anything from 12-28 hours) and leaving to prove for an hour or so. My Dutch oven is a little too large for the amount of dough so I put another dish inside it and this work well. 

It was absolutely bucketing down and as we had been warned of the approaching storm I decided to make yesterday a bake day.  Refreshed Yeast water and levain on Saturday and made initial builds of levain and left overnight.  It is winter and so things are moving a bit slowly.

First off the rank was a repeat of Abe’s Swiss Farmhouse bread.  I followed the recipe here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/56266/swiss-farmhouse-bread-using-raspberry-yw

I repeated last week’s bake of 36+hour Baguettes, overall hydration at 74% this time. The shaping went much better and although I thought the scoring was easier the cuts didn’t open up as well as I hoped.

Type 70 flour, proofed en couch and transferred to the stone by flipboard. 4 Demi-baguettes, 15” long, 250 grams dough weight each. Baked with hot water on lava rocks for steam in the first half of the bake. It’s a good challenge and there’s always a reason to do it again! I need to shuffle the loaves around on the stone next time to get the sides to brown more evenly 

Last night I made six loaves of Tartine. Four, using the basic formula, I bake last night after a three hour rise. Two of them I added rosemary and sautéed shallots. 

Two of them I started a little later and refrigerate overnight for a morning bake. Those two had 20% gray flour, 10% whole wheat, and 70% bread flour.

This is the 3 hour bake without gray flour 

This is the overnight gray flour bake

       Following on the path of my West Coast baking friends DA and Lucy, I was inspired to make a mostly white bread with a few twists.  I had not used Kamut for a while, so in went some fresh milled and sifted once with a #40 sieve into the mix along with a high percent of pecans and a healthy dose of buttermilk.

I really tested my knowledge and experience the other day. I had a bit of firm biga left from something else I was making and I hate wasting stuff, so I decided to make it into a loaf of bread. I did not measure anything for this, at all, so can't give you the recipe, but here's what I did:

… with good results, I decided to adapt the recipe for a 750g loaf, plus a bit. 

Starting off with 120g 100% hydration rye starter (base NMNF), I built a loaf comprising a mix of 33% rye, 20% each of whole wheat, AP and HG flours, 10% spelt, 1.75% caraway seeds, 1% VWG, 2% malt powder, with a reduction in water resulting in 73% overall hydration. 

I decided to offer the formula of my last bake another chance as the bread tasted too good to abandon. To solve the spreading issue, the hydration is dropped from 88% to 83%. This produced a much more manageable dough. In the hope of preserving the fragile gluten, I also added a 15 minutes autolyse and reduced the round of stretch and fold from two to one only.