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It's been a while and I had a craving for some PVM.  I figured I'd do one final experiment and see the results using a stiff levain.

 I've used an 18 hour liquid wheat whole wheat levain (the original), 1/2 liquid white levain, 1/2 liquid wheat levain + 1/2 white, 1/2 white levain and 1/2 rye sour. I think the best is the 1/2 liquid white 1/2 liquid wheat. 

  This is a big one...and a tasty one, great with some barbeque.  If you are on a diet the butter and yogurt in this one is not going to do you any favors, but both added to the overall moistness in the final dough.

I love the way the roasted red peppers compliment the corn and the combination of Semolina flour along with the other flours really gives this bread a unique flavor worth trying.

After seeing Phyllis’s fine baguettes based on David Snyder’s San Joaquin recipe this week, we decided that we would do some baguettes to practice slashing - it’s been at least a year.  Plus the he date of Lucy’s Mom’s untimely death is approaching and that requires some kind slashing, no matter what, in her honor – lighting a candle just won’t do.

This is a 60% hydration dough, for some reason that is , for me, the best hydration to work with.

Recipe:

250g Mature Wheat Sourdough 

450g Bread Flour

I've seen a few posts showcasing polenta sourdough breads lately, so here's my take on it.

I cooked more porridge than I needed for the dough because it's hard to cook less using my smallest pot. I added 30 g Bob's Red Mill polenta (corn grits) to 120 g boiling water and cooked it over low heat until the water was just absorbed. I let the porridge cool overnight in the refrigerator.

I made my first gluten-free sourdough loaf, adapted from a recipe by Nicole Hunn in her book, Gluten-Free on a Shoestring Bakes Bread.

After a long break I am back in my search for perfection - this time is a recipe for a perfect white loaf, and I have found it!! I have tried it in its true form and have tried to play around with the recipe, and it still stands - this IS perception in a loaf.

Full recipe on my blog here

Excuse the poor slicing photo - more photos coming on the blog soon

Susan and I have just returned from two weeks in Italy. We spent a week in Venice, a couple days in Lucca and 4 days in Liguria. We broke up our return trip with an overnight stay in Milan. I am happy to report that the bread we had was much superior to that of our last visit to Amelia-Romagna and Tuscany  three years ago. 

The bread we were served in restaurants was almost always made wholly with white flour.

When I was in the UK last week, I made David's excellent recipe below.  As I have done many times in the past, I prepared the dough and froze half of it to bake later.  I hadn't tried this with baguettes, so I was interested in how it would turn out.  I froze the dough for four days. On the first batch, I had a heck of a time moving them, as I didn't have all the tools I have in my home kitchen.  They got a bit flat as I moved them.

The recent posts from wassisname and limmitedbaking got me hankering to try this bread.

I used the formula here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/34729/polenta-pepita-sourdough, but, as happens in the Hippie Kitchen, modified the method: