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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

I began baking bread in 2009 after being laid off from my job.  It was not a life long desire to bake bread.  In fact, I hadn't even spent much time in the kitchen at that point.  But somehow, I became enthralled with bread baking.  Might I even say, passionate about bread baking.  And because I suddenly had lots of time on my hands, I practiced almost daily.  Not necessarily baking every day, but reading about, or buying supplies for, or tending a starter for baking.

Hi all,

I am new here and this is my first post on The Fresh Loaf!

Today I would like to share my first attempt at baking Sourdough Boule with Japanese Clay Pot.

Japanese Clay Pot (a.k.a. Donabe) is a symbol of comfort food for Japanese people.

(Oh, by the way, I am Japanese :-))

I am back today, to tell you all about one of our favourite breads these days: Pain au Levain. I’ve baked this bread using one of Codruta‘s recipes and we loved it!

Time schedule:

Sometimes I look through recipes and don’t have what they require or just want to use stuff up that I have. Lately I have been enjoying my seed and grain breads, and mixed flour breads. I had some nice organic brown rice and some millet I wanted to use up. Personally, I think the hydration in dough is often the deciding factor in a quality outcome so I try to pay attention to that and try to determine it for recipes I review.

 OK, so first I needed to decide how much bread to make. For this experiment I figured I would start with a 1kg loaf just to test.

Okay, I'm back to my normal self again baking abi-normal breads.  I've made bread with corn flour before, but this time I wanted to use a slurry of roasted corn as well as use corn flour in the sourdough starter.  I also wanted to add some cheese and I thought some nice salty tasting Feta cheese would be a good combination.  The bread is just about to come out of the oven and I ca

   Every once in a while I feel the need to make a more simple bread; one that will make a great sandwich.  With that in mind I decided to make a version of a Pain Au Levain using some French style flour from KAF, whole wheat and some dark rye flour and toasted wheat germ in the final dough.

Long time, no see, TFL.

In summary I've been away, coping with a hefty workload and tending to personal matters. Of course, I continued baking---a tendency I doubt will be curbed or abandoned. Why's that? Because baking is my stress-reliever. (I'm sure many homebakers can relate.)

Without further ado, I present to you my latest experiment: Cumin Walnut Cheese Rye Sourdough Bread.