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The local dairy that I get my yogurt from is slowly expanding their products and the latest is a hard Herb Cheese. 

 It is actually fairly strong tasting and the thyme really comes through. I thought it would be perfect with some roasted garlic and sun dried tomatoes. So here goes:

Makes 3 loaves. 

Levain:

63 g starter

63 g water

110 g unbleached flour

15 g freshly milled Rye flour

I based my recipe on Maurizio’s Fifty-Fifty Whole Wheat Sourdough Bread.  I decided to lower the whole wheat just a bit.

For single loaf weight 750 grams 40% Red Fife

I opened up a bottle of Rose wine from a local Long Island winery that I really enjoyed, so figured why not use it in my next bake.  I usually use a stronger full bodied red wine which also tends to add more color to the dough, but the lighter flavored Rose was a nice change of pace.

Cherries are nice and sweet from the market now, so instead of using dried cherries I pitted some fresh ones for this bake and cut them up into pieces to add to the dough.  The sour cream really help make this bread nice and moist.

This is a khorasan oat sourdough, a lighter bread than I usually bake. I wanted a light, soft crumb while still including as much fresh milled whole grain as possible. In "Tartine 3" Robertson explains how he accomplishes this by way of various additions to his basic doughs using high extraction flours, porridges, soakers, sprouted grains.  So for this bread I mixed 300 g fresh milled high extraction khorasan flour with 700 g all purpose white flour, autolysed with 750 g water for 3 hours.

Last week I was trying to enjoy my trip to NY, and I met up with The Roadside Pie King for a couple of slices of pizza (imagine that!).  But then Abe sent a link to me from the ace bakers at The Weekend Bakery and encouraged me to give it a go.  Upon returning home the other evening, I decided to do just that yesterday and a bake this morning.

Image

Starter out of fridge almost a week

All KAF AP

I stopped off at the local IGA and purchased the very convenient small pack of yeast at 82 cents and 2kgs of black and gold flour $1.50 and took them to my daughters house where i was to mind my eldest teenage grand daughter (school holidays) and my wife had the other 2 at our house (sleepover). The minding of the teenager is relatively easy they sleep in then when they do wake get straight onto their electronic devices, so making a loaf was to give me something to do.

This is an 87% rye with a lot going on: a 3-stage rye sponge, a whole-wheat sponge, and a rye flour soaker. It calls for medium rye, which is a difficult thing to pin down. All I have at the moment are white rye and a finely milled whole rye, so I mixed and matched those two flours in various percentages for this bread.

It also calls for 4 tsps Brotgewürz. I used 2 tsps of the bread spice I already had mixed up, the bulk of which is ground caraway. It's not very noticeable, which is the way I like it.

Recently I made this gluten free pizza for my younger daughter who has intolerance for the gluten and also should not eat cheese. Hence the pizza was made without cheese what is quite unusual, but it was generously topped with grilled vegetables.

Here is a video about preparation.

Happy baking, Joze