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Now that I have discovered a good source of Montreal smoked meat in town, I determined to do the deli rye from Peter Reinhart's, "Bread Baker's Apprentice." I have baked this recipe often, but this was the first time I built a fully rye starter. My previous starters were a wheat/rye mix. this time I starting from my mother, I fed with rye flour four times over three days and for the fourth and final feed added the sauteed yellow onions. After a few hours it was time to mix and bake.

Kalamata Olive and Asiago Cheese sourdough , had a nice taste

Artisan Bread School is running the following courses:

Winnipeg, Canada 1 - 5 April 2019 COURSE FULL

Fattoria degli Usignoli, Tuscany, Italy 6 -10 May 2019 PLACES AVAILABLE https://www.artisan-bread-school.com/course/five-day-course-at-fattoria-degli-usignoli-italy-may-2019/

Fattoria degli Usignoli, Tuscany, Italy 14 - 18 May 2019 COURSE FULL

I'd mentioned to Abe that I was thinking of rosemary and onion for my next bake (working on shaping and scoring) and he came back with a suggestion for this lovely recipe for tomato bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou.

Of course, why not?

The first surprising thing was the quantity of levain: 300g of 100% levain for 400g of flour! And since I wanted two 700g-ish loaves, I found myself building 450g of levain over the course of two days, after which I left it to retard in the fridge.

The various Rosellas in our garden loves eating the lavender seeds, sometimes daintily holding it with their feet while eating. It served as my inspiration for bread this week. Lavender makes me think of France, so voila, Lavender Fougasse! 

The lavender flavour is very strong, so I used only a sprinkle and combined it with rosemary and orange thyme. I used my wheat sourdough starter for this one.

This week I decided to wing it somewhat, a departure for me. I made a dough I’ve made often before - 30% whole wheat, 79% hydration, 12% levain - and added a soaker of a small handful each of sesame, flax, chia, pumpkin, and sunflower seeds. I didn’t weigh the seeds or water in the soaker because I knew it would be a much higher percentage of the dough weight than much I was taught to use. My bad! I’ll have to experiment to recreate it to get the wonderful aroma and flavor. The dry seeds were probably around 30% or more of the dough weight.

I've been wanting to try baking these for quite some time now and finally managed to do it.  Unlike NY style bagels these are not boiled, but rather baked and dipped in a sweet pomegranate molasses and sesame seed mixture which gives these bagels a very unique flavor.  I converted a recipe using instant yeast to sourdough I found in The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis. My mother starter is kept at 66% hydration so if yours is different you can adjust accordingly.

This loaf was partly inspired by the tempering technique in Indian cooking. The aroma of spices blooming in hot oil is notably different from that of dry toasting spices. This makes sense: we all know the flavor of spices is oil-soluble :)

Spiced Walnuts SD with 50% Sprouted White Wheat & Rye

Dough flour (all freshly milled):

It was time to clean out a few items from the pantry and the fridge. I found two kinds of feta, three kinds of olives, sun-dried tomatoes and roasted peppers, both in oil. So this recipe was created with the help of Cathy’s (nmygarden) recipe from last March. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/55587/happy-baker

This was a repeat of this lovely bread, attempting to get more height and less spread.  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/58551/oaty-sourdough.  I also wanted to see if there was a difference between my two starters.