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Pain au Levain with Red Fife Whole Wheat Flour

This was my first time to use oven to bake bread (before used bread machine). I had been wanting to try the no-knead bread receipe since it came out in 2006.

I followed the original receipe but tuned it to suit my case. Since my order of the digital scale hasn't arrived, I could only use volume to measure the quantities:

• 3 Cup flour (2 AP + 1 WW)
• 1 5/8 tsp salt
• 3/8 tsp active dry yeast (direct into the mix)
• 1 5/8 Cup filtered water

After mixing, it looked pretty sloppy.

What a mouthfull of a title and what and what a mouth full of a bread

I have recently made a very nice Dark Irish Stout and retained the dregs from the bottom of the fermenter. The stout has just been sampled with  a very big tick of approval it was a very vigourous brew and performed very well indeed. i took 250 grams of stoneground wholemeal flour and added 250mls of my brewery sludge  and bought it together and set it aside as a soaker.

Plain sourdough is not something I make often, though I intended to  but I seems to easily get distracted by multigrain and/or fruit breads. Somehow, I feel like one last weekend and I picked the Pain au Levain with whole wheat from jeffrey Hamelman's Bread cookbook.

For turkey day this year the family get-together will be smaller than usual, 18 rather than the more usual 25 to 30. Maybe that's not a bad thing, though. I volunteered to bring the bread and a dessert.

With a house full of company, my little grandaughter helped me make this apple and pumpkin pie.  We used Caroline's buttermilk crust recipe..ran a little short on dough..so didn't get a fancy crimped edge..no matter, won't affect the taste...

I made one large 7 pound recipe for two loaves (Hamelman's "Vermont Sourdough with Increased Whole Wheat").  Given they were 3.5 lbs each I baked one at a time. Both were retarded 13 hours in the fridge (okay, one was 12 and one was 13 hours) then placed directly on the hot stone after slashing, steam used first 12 minutes.

Because I did not want to throw out some left over starter, I made Flo's 123 formula.  I thought it turned out pretty good.  Loaf got cut before I got a pic, but have pics of  what was not consumed.  Every body here rated it good, but to me it didn't have the degree of sour tang to it that I like.  Crust was definitely chewy and the crumb was chewy also. Overall it was  a good bake. 

Formula: 

 250 grams   White Starter (67% hydration)

We broke up a jack-o-lantern for soup the other day (just a regular pumpkin, not a sugar-pie or anything, not a pumpkin especially for eating but of course edible). Had a couple cups of mashed baked pumpkin left over, so I thought I'd see what happened when I put it in bread. I wasn't expecting much flavor, since the regular pumpkins just don't have that much. The answer, in short, was: Eh, it's bread. Sort of moist.

The long answer:

Evening of Day 0:

This is my recipe of a 50% sourdough spelt.