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I am new to bread baking having done most of my baking in the cake arena.  Anyway, after a trip to Montreal and tasting the finest bread to have ever touched my palette from one of the local boulangeries, (the bread put my sandwich filing to shame!) I have chosen to set out on the oft trodden path of trying to bake some myself.  I  purchased a few books by some of the usual suspects mentioned on this site and decided to give the Forkish Saturday 75% Whole Wheat Bread a go.

Ken Forkish calls this "Overnight Country Blonde," but that doesn't describe the method I used.

Lucy originally set out to do her take on combining Karin’s take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread and Karin’s Great Wild Rice bread.  Both of these breads are on our favorite list and on Lucy’s top three breads for various years.

After my numerous trial and errors journey of trying to grow my very first sourdough starter I am pleased to announce that this morning a miracle happened!!!she finally ripened (she passed the float test with awesome bubbles and a mildly sweet + acidic/sour aroma) and me being an eager beaver I decided to have a go at making a sourdough bread using the Tartine 80% hydration whole wheat recipe and it worked,I have made my very first sour dough bread,elated best describes my feeling right now!!! Look at the crumb on that baby... :-)  

Scalded Rye Bread

It's been a worthwhile experience. I feel I've learned a lot of the basics for handling rye flours. Four of eighteen I'll add to my modest repertoire: Rye Sticks, Milwaukee Rye, Zeltan (Tyrolean Fruit Bread) and Rye Squares; I'll likely tweak them all to better match the flavors I want.

Decided it was time to have a go at using sourdough only in my favourite yeasted bread.  

the recipe (From Rose levy Berambaum's Bread Bible) uses white bread flour but I chose to use a little whole wheat in the mix.

Grain soaker - 236 gm mixed grains,113 gm hot water,9 gm salt soaked overnight 

final dough

237 gm bread flour

65 gm whole wheat flour

12 gm gluten

153 gm water

12 gm honey

Levain - 85 gm 125% hydration

Happy New Year to all, from a newbie to bread and to this forum!

I agree with CAphyl: There's something special about the notion of giving a yeast bread as a holiday gift. And I could be biased by my recent discovery of wild yeast, but I love the idea even more if the loaf is a sourdough.

Or last 2 bakes of the year.  Took a 2 week hiatus from my bread reservation program and put the culture to sleep in the fridge for a week.  It is back out and coming back into it's own but it needs 3-4 days of regular refreshing before it's ready to build a levain.  Should have thought to freeze some bread for the break.  I didn't so I made French Bread based on the Tradition baguette formula incorporating 5% whole Rye for part of the flour.  I made 750g batard's proofed en couche.

We have a tradition to bring in the New Year with pizza.  How this got started I can’t remember but I do remember the lobster tails that used to be NY Eve fare.  This year’s crust was the best yet though and so was the sauce according to my daughter who keeps track of these things.

So, how'd I do on last year's list I posted?

1)  I will continue to share home-made bread.  Did that pretty well -- my end of year total for dough produced was over 324 kilograms (more than 714 lbs), with (my guess) more than 80% of that gifted.

2)  I will move more.  Haven't done enough of that.

3)  I will do more of what I want.  Still trying.