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I am continuing to practice my baguettes.  This latest iteration shows some promise .  It seems my oven bakes slow.  I turned up the heat to 480F on the second batch and got some better results.  I also steamed and steamed for the first 10 minutes of the bake, then switched to convection bake, hoping the increased air flow would help to vent the steam.  One other thing I did was use 10% whole wheat flour in the formula from Txfarmer for straight baguette dough.  I also let the loaves proof a bit longer.  I will continue my quest.  I've ordered a good

There have been a lot of English Muffin recipes posted all over the web. While I yearned for a homemade muffin, I didn’t relish the steps to make them. I don’t have a griddle and cooking them in batches in a frying pan seemed problematic.

Visiting the arts & crafts store with my wife and daughter I picked up a stencil and on the second try got a design that I was quite happy with.:

The Ciril Hitz video that gave me the idea and illustrates the method is here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZt1WWSAj6M. I spritzed the dough with water before stencilling and I think that helped, but I still found myself hold the stencil in place with one hand.

My love for bread, cooking in general, and gardening centers around one, important person in my life. I am fully willing to admit that, at least when it comes to Mamo (my maternal grandmother), my memory may be a tad biased. With that said, if I were to describe Mamo (pronounced "ma'am-moe"), I would certainly include the words intelligent, beautiful, capable, and even superhero. She sewed, gardened, baked, cooked, and cleaned in her spare time. She worked as a secretary for an incredibly successful real estate broker in my hometown of Arlington, TX.

Si, si, si per favore!!  I have to say these little beauties (in general) are gorgeous and so easy to make .

The ones in Venezia are sublime, especially the ones with the pastry creme in them.

Heavenly.

I have seen other variations throughout Italy but i didn't take much notice at the time:(  They were selling something similar at night in Siena at the odd stall around the city.

Not at Palio time, in winter.......

So this my Frittelle friends, is what we are aiming for!!

We had a can of pumpkin puree kicking around. I'm tired of the usual pumpkin quick bread and wanted something lighter.  Some time ago our paper had a braided yeast-raised pumpkin bread, originally from King Arthur. I started there and somehow ended up here:

Sorry, no crumb shot; the good light was gone by the time I sliced it.

I'm going to try another spin, this time with a preferment to punch it up a bit; then I think this one will be done.

We have a big pot of borscht to eat and wanted some hearty rye bread to go with it, so last night I mixed up the soaker and wild yeast starter for Rye Sandwich Meteil.  I had read on TFL that the bread had come out quite sweet for some, so I used only half the sweeting called for in the formula.  The bread 'rose' more sideways than anything else, but is still very tasty. 

Locked up indoors while mending from some winter crud, Saturday night I took my recently refreshed liquid levain and made two preferments. One whole wheat and one whole spelt. Sunday morning I added them to some water, then added bread flour, salt, and yeast. Fermented, stretch fold, ferment, shape, proof, bake. Seems no matter what I do, the sharp edges of the spelt bran never soften. Energy bread,s surface I make using spelt, feels like 220 grit sandpaper. I fined nothing wrong with it, but find spelt is the only whole grain flour wwhere I experience  rougher the texture.

Varda caught the the original Pope's Hat was really a Priest's Hat and then we found out it wasn't and Priest's Hat either so we got a chance to fix that, inserting Priest's for Pope's and also fixing that to remove the Priest's Hat entirely and our spelling and grammer errors too.  Hope this clears up the confusion in a confusing way.

We were making a stiffer levain Italian style and decided to revisit another Italian bread – Altamura style like David Snyder did here