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Hello all, Greetings from Singapore from another bread fanatic. This is a wonderful website for learning and I have learnt so much from it. Thanks. I baked some Ciabatta today. The pics are in http://www.angelfire.com/planet/tomsbread/index.htm Tomsbread

This recipe is the result of a mixture of ideas from a few different recipes.

Last week I managed to try a few other recipes with mixed results... 1)Rustic Bread Very nice loaves of bread. Delicious!!!

I was originally going to try the Italian bread from BBA this weekend, but I forgot to write down the biga recipe so I had to scrap that idea. So instead I decided to come here and look up something else to try. The victim of my baking experiment would end up being Floyd's daily bread recipe. As other people did, I found the dough to be extremely wet. I had to add another 1/2 cup of flour for the dough to come together. It was still very slack, but I could still work it.

A big baking weekend, now that my oven is fixed:

Nice and sour 100% whole wheat sandwich bread

Pain au levain (actually, Jeffrey Hammelman's Vermont Sourdough, but I live in Watertown, MA, so technically, I suppose it should be "Watertown Sourdough")

Baguettes (using the BBA's French bread formula which employs a pate fermente)

Whole wheat sourdough with raisins, pecans and a cinnamon sugar swirl.

I just finished making my second loaves from this site...the Rustic Bread. I followed the ingredient amounts exactly.

There's pecan craisin and sourdough rye and pumpernickel breads on the top of my fridge. Banana bread on my counter. Sourdough craisin dinner rolls, herb rye, pumpernickel and pizza dough fill my freezer. 25 lb buckets of flour fill my basement. Sourdough starters crowd my fridge. My in-laws have threatened my life for making them fat with breads they can't resist. It's a terrible addiction :) -Joe

It's been raining for two weeks, and we're about to get yet another week of rain. Luckily, I'm not in any danger of getting flooded out, but I may end up working from home at the rate they're closing roads. Very wet. And at the rate that sewage and water treatment plants are going offline, I may end up boiling all our water soon. My oven will be repaired on Friday, but it still works well enough for me to keep a fairly constant 350 degrees -- good enough for the BBA's raisin-walnut (I prefer pecan, being a former Southern boy, myself) bread.

Okay, now I am trying to figure out how to post photos without having them appear in the Gallery :) I just discovered "Flickr", so I will try to post a link to my site to show my first attempt at Floydm's Pain Sur Poolish".

Well this is my 2nd attempt at Jeffrey Hamelman's whole-wheat bread. The first turned out pretty well so my wife requested more (the best toast ever according to her). I started the pre-ferment the morning before work, mixed up the dough after work and then fermented/proofed. Unfortunately time was my enemy as I was unable to allow a full final proof. As a result I had some out of control oven spring action I think. No matter, tasted better this time than last! (different flour)