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I've been making Kouign Amann for a long time but it wasn't until I visited their homeland of Brittany I realized I had completely misunderstood this delicious pastry. In Brittany I discovered Kouign Amann is not the sophisticated laminated pastry made from croissant dough I thought it was. It is a rustic treat with humble pedigree and it tasted tasted better, much better, than anything I’d ever made. And to add insult to injury it was also much easier to produce!

After a few weeks of making really basic loaves, nothing fancy just 1-2-3 loaves, I thought it was time for a high rye.

I’ve made 70% rye before so I thought I should be brave and try 80%. I was going to load it up with all sorts of seeds and nuts but I ended up going for a fairly plain rye. The only extra in this loaf is a bit of Star Anise (which I’m not usually a big fan of, but bread tends to make things better).

So here’s the formula:

I mentioned in an earlier post that my wife was not so enamored with "artisan" bread. For this loaf, I did a complete 180 and baked something that was far, far outside of my wheelhouse. Actually, my wife was specific about it, after I pressed her on why she wouldn't eat my bread for the fourth time that day.

"I want brioche" she said. "Make me brioche and I will eat it."

"How hard could it be?" I said, foolishly, and not for the first time.

One of my coworkers has a serious problem tolerating wheat, though she is not celiac. She agreed to try some experiments (with her as the subject!) to see where the boundaries of her wheat issues lay.

Our first experiment, some time last year, was a very, very long ferment sourdough. That loaf was modestly successful -- her symptoms were relatively mild.

I'm falling behind on posting. Still baking, but I have a backlog of photos and posts to do. Trying to catch up.

Here's a loaf to change things up a bit. My wife is actually not super fond of "artisan" bread. She'll eat it, but she prefers softer bread, and always cuts the crust off regardless of what kind of bread it is. This is, needless to say, a bit of a sore point in our household.

I managed to find some of Cedar Mountain's recipes on Tapatalk and since hubby had requested a rye loaf for this week, I thought I would give it a shot. It didn't get the oven spring that Cedar Mountain gets but it sure smells wonderful. Crumb shot will be forthcoming once we cut into it.

Lucy had come up with a 50% sprouted 9 gran SD for this week’s bake but, at the last minute, we saw Lazy Loafers 50% whole wheat bread that has a yeast kicker in it.  Normally we don’t put yeast in a SD bread because it just makes things go faster and reduces the flavor of the bread.

Buongiorno everyone.  It's been a while.

I bought myself a copy of Daniel Leader's "Local Breads" just before Christmas. It's a very good read for one thing - lots of stories about his travels to different parts of Europe, learning the secrets of many traditional regional breads from France, Italy, Poland, Germany, etc. There are lots of techniques to try and recipes scaled for the home baker.

Just posting to catalog photos and thoughts as my baking progresses.

This first batch:

-Outer crumb was light and airy, but when I cut into the middle of the loaf, it was much more dense.

-I got impatient during the final rise and was feeling antsy, so I baked after only 2.5 hours.

-I still felt pure joy when I took the steam lid off and saw that my all day project had been successful!