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Lots of firsts in this loaf, so not sure any conclusions can be drawn from any one part of it, but overall, the combination produced a really nice loaf (for me anyway).

- New recipe

- New shaping technique

- New DIY baking steel

- New starter (not really done yet, but I got impatient)

Recipe

My starters are usually fed a variety of flours depending on what I fancy. During rye+ap week, I made these orange-y loaves with the last of the flours I had.

So made the Forkish Walnut Levain bread which produces two loaves but now want to substitute cranberries for the walnuts. The recipe calls for 225g of walnuts. What about the cranberry amount and is there anything I need to do to the cranberries before adding them to the final mix. The image posted is of the walnut levain. Not bad but would like to try cranberries or something else. 

Paul 

This is the same recipe as the recently posted 50% whole wheat Hokkaido sourdough milk bread except that the total dough weight was reduced to make 8 buns in a 9” cake pan. These are going to my sister’s house for our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner tonight, the first time having a family dinner since the pandemic started.

 8 rolls in a 9” round pan or

9 rolls in a 8” square pan

Ingredients

Sweet Stiff Starter 

I was very taken with HungryShots/Denisa's recent blog post on her 40% spelt SD loaf and her excellent description of the evolution of her Mk IV version.

So when I found a bag of Doves Farm white spelt flour in a local shop, I thought it was time to give it a try.

Denisa had done all the hard work, so I changed very little:

Ingredients:

Working with a new whole wheat flour now, this is a local organic stone ground flour that I’m hoping will taste great. I’m also hoping that the thinner crust I achieved recently by not baking in my dutch oven wasn’t a fluke so I’m baking open in my oven with steam using the Sylvia towel and a cast iron skillet again.  

Same recipe that I’ve used in the past but I switched out the flours to use Spelt and Durum and decided to try broken wild rice rather than the regular long grain. It was quite a bit cheaper too!

Recipe 

Makes 3 loaves

Dough:

700 g strong bakers unbleached flour

200 g fresh milled Spelt 

100 g fresh milled Durum

75 g dry broken Wild Rice 

150 g dried cranberries 

700 g water

30 g yogurt 

35 g honey

22 g salt

I saw a picture of your Debra Wink’s 800-gram loaf in a 330 mm / 13 inch Pullman pan. It looked terrific, so I ordered the pan from the USA. It arrived this week, so today I baked using the pan and was very pleased, apart from a shaping mistake (I shaped as per a batard out of habit instead of a blunt cylinder). I’m learning with each iteration of this wonderful bread. It’s such a beautiful taste that it is now has a place in our weekly breadbasket. A nice light soft crumb.

Cheers,

Gavin