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I haven’t baked for the last couple of weekends because I was in Antigua for my niece’s wedding. It was my first time in the Caribbean and it was fabulous. Great resort, great food and fantastic weather. It sure beats what we have been having here.

I am continuing  baking breads inspired by CedarMountains recipes from a couple of years ago. This one is very similar but not exactly like his. 

Recipe 

Last night I made a little Spelt loaf.......... it was SO good that I repeated it again this morning.

I used the Patrick Ryan method.......... but altered the handling times a little :)

This is simply the lightest and tastiest Wholemeal Spelt loaf I have ever made!

Here are my notes if you fancy a go:

(Sorry for the text layout, I uploaded this from my iPhone 

Baby Spelt loaf

Just some pictures from my first venture into pita.

I grew up having papo secos (pops), Portuguese buns, on a regular basis. Everything went in these things or just eaten as is or with soft butter. So, when I began baking bread I had to attempt these and have since made them a few times. When memorial day came around a while back I of course had burgers and I used my papo secos recipe to do so and the result was slamming! A few had sesame seeds and egg wash with honey and others were naked as a Jay Bird..... And not to disrespect the original I made the pops too.

These are my first baguettes, ever! I am so glad with how they turned out especially that they were not baked in an oven. I feel that it is a real accomplishment in my baking; I thought baguettes were impossible to bake in my clay pot, but I just defied that today. Perhaps the only impossible clay pot bakes are breads that cannot be flipped like a pizza but if it can be flipped, I can handle it! :)

That Lucy is a pistol.  She has been working very hard for weeks on her app to replace every job people do, just like Silicon Valley is doing, thinking they were going to beat her to it and the next thing you know she stopped working on that, thank goodness, and started working on her new even more important app.

I love making bread but until now haven't had much success with sourdough. I think I've "cracked" it now - the flavor and texture is pretty good but it's cracking on top. I'm using the no knead method, mixing the dough the night before, folding in the morning (can be anything from 12-28 hours) and leaving to prove for an hour or so. My Dutch oven is a little too large for the amount of dough so I put another dish inside it and this work well. 

It was absolutely bucketing down and as we had been warned of the approaching storm I decided to make yesterday a bake day.  Refreshed Yeast water and levain on Saturday and made initial builds of levain and left overnight.  It is winter and so things are moving a bit slowly.

First off the rank was a repeat of Abe’s Swiss Farmhouse bread.  I followed the recipe here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/56266/swiss-farmhouse-bread-using-raspberry-yw

I repeated last week’s bake of 36+hour Baguettes, overall hydration at 74% this time. The shaping went much better and although I thought the scoring was easier the cuts didn’t open up as well as I hoped.

Type 70 flour, proofed en couch and transferred to the stone by flipboard. 4 Demi-baguettes, 15” long, 250 grams dough weight each. Baked with hot water on lava rocks for steam in the first half of the bake. It’s a good challenge and there’s always a reason to do it again! I need to shuffle the loaves around on the stone next time to get the sides to brown more evenly