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Lucy couldn't even remember the time we had pizza - and we love making pizza nearly as much as we love eating it.  This one had a fast crust since we didn't decide to have pizza until 2 PM for dinner at 6 PM.

Se we went with a fast dough using a couple of large pinches of instant yeast, have high gluten and half bread flour and no whole grains. I hope Lucy doesn't burn in doggy hell for this.

Here is my favourite rye sourdough with a few variations. When I am not trying out other recipes I bake two loaves every week for my family who won't have it any other way. The loaves can easily be stored for up to 10 days before they get too dry and hard, and I think that they improve in both taste and texture for the first 2-4 days. 

Top the slices with cheese, salami, ham, cucumber slices, boiled eggs and mayonaise, smoked fish, paté, or whatever you fancy.

Day 1, evening

Soaker

I decided I needed to check starter activity as it had been untouched in fridge since early August appart from a refresh last week.  I had quite a few grains in the pantry so decided these needed to be used up.  I made my favourite multigrain recipe but made a couple of small changes.  

An invite to a dinner party for 8 folks at our uncle's house prompted my wife to say that she would like me to bake a few Semolina batards to bring.  She, OTOH, decided on baking the above pictured rum infused and lemon zested Torta di Riso (Italian Rice Cake).

fire bricks not over lined alu foil ... with only a rack in between fire bricks n oven floor ... baking temp 250c from start to finish ... 30 minutes ... even tried with a sheet of alu foil covering the glass panel of oven ... established that it does help to stop heat loss shaving off 4 minutes off of 30min bake time... 

Since I had some levain left over from my other bakes and I hate throwing good stuff out, I weighed it and decided that 125 g was enough for a 1-2-3 loaf. 

I just threw all of the following stuff together, no autolyse, into a bowl and right into fermentation:

125 g half rye, half AP levain

250 g warm water

200 g unbleached flour 

120 g white wholewheat 

55 g kamut

7 g salt

My pottery instructor gave me some of her organic apples so I dehydrated them in the hopes of making bread with them. So surfing TFL, I found DAB's Apple Prune Bread and took my inspiration from that. 

I soaked separately 150 g dried cranberries and 50 g dried Apple bits. I toasted 50 g walnuts, 20g chia seeds and 20 g flax seeds. After a whirl in the mini chopper, the chia seeds were soaked in 60 g water and the flax in 40 g water. 

I am super pleased with the oven spring on this one. This is a variation of Tartine 3's Flax Sunflower Bread. 

I toasted 140 g of sunflower seeds and 140 g of flax seeds. I gave the flax a whirl in my mini chopper and then soaked them overnight in 180 g of water. 

This weekend, I wanted to make a rye bread to go with smoked fish, and, since I was refreshing my rye sour anyway, I also made a pain au levain with a rye starter. The rye is another Berliner Landsbrot (thank you Stan Ginsberg). The Pain au levain is a formula posted quite a while back by Hansjoakim. Formulas for both are available on TFL.

Seitan

For most of you on The Fresh Loaf site, “vital wheat gluten” is an essential ingredient used to get that additional rise in whole wheat bread.  That was my experience as well until about six months ago.  Now, “vital wheat gluten” is the key ingredient I use to make Seitan or “Wheat Meat!”