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After reading in Reinhart's WGB pages 205-209, I made up my mind to give it a try.  I discovered my very nearby microbrewery gives away their spent grain so I dropped by to gather up a few plastic containers of rather warm steaming fresh spent barley grain.  Using white bread flour, a little rye, salt, instant yeast, water, and caraway seeds, I made a free standing loaf.  I'm not good at free standing loaves despite some years of baking -------not that I was baking in great amounts-----but ever so rarely in free standing loaves.

this weekend I researched the strenght and taste of my wild yeast. I made one starter with wild yeast (pure), one with an extra half a teaspone of commercial yeast, and the third with some sourdough powder I once bought. Also, in the oven I covered half of the breads with a alu-foil pain for the first 15 minutes.

The loaf is baked and to be truthful I can't see any difference - I was expecting the beer to have some effect and maybe the flour. The loaf slid partway off the parchment as I was loading it so I retrieved the parchment to use another day. The loaf did sing a muted song which was nice. So I am happy with the Bob's Red Mill flour - but won't add beer in future. I'm taking it for supper with the family and will try to get a shot of the crumb, A.

I attempted David's sourdough adaptation of the anis bouabsa baguette...

I have made soft pretzels in the past, and have always enjoyed them, however I have always wanted to make a sourdough version. After much internet research, I did not come across any recipes that called out to me, so I decided to do my own. I adapted a Bertinet recipe, simply replacing fermented white dough in the recipe with an equal quantity of firm sourdough starter. I also retarded the dough in the fridge over night... though this was more to do with the fact that I wanted to bake them fresh the next morning rather than anything else.

I made two loaves this week: The first was a take on the "Pain au levain with whole wheat flour" from Hamelman's book. Although I've had the book on my shelf for just over a year, I hadn't tried any of his pain au levains before. The time was overripe (like a "bubbly, collapsed poolish"-overripe). To make things a bit more interesting, I replaced half of the bread flour with spelt, and added a liberal amount of wheat bran to the recipe. I guess this detracted a bit from the potential loaf volume, but added to its nutritional value and the flavour.

Pugliese Loaves with Duram Flour from RLBeranbaum's

An old favorite for over 30 years, walnut cinnamon lemon bread is simple, crunchy and chewy.  The basic recipe is flexible rather than perfectionist.  I used frozen orange juice, thawed and room tmperature, back in those days. 

3 cups AP flour

instant yeast perhaps a big pinch

pinch of salt

1 maybe 2 ounces oil

8-9 ounces water

cinnamon as you like, I like it so I may use more than you

I know that it isn't a good idea to change more than one thing at a time, but hey, the sun is shining and I feel daring! I stood in front of the Bob's Red Mill display yesterday and for the first time noticed a 5# bag of unbleached white flour which is "Superb for bread making by hand or machine". Also supposed to be high protein.

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