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My daughter asked me to make hamburger and hot dog buns for tomorrow's barbeque and I decided to try my hand at sourdough buns. I have been working on a sourdough sandwich bread and I combined that with my regular hamburger bun recipe and came up with these. They are definitely not the squishy store bought buns but the crust is soft and crumb will hold up to a hamburger and fixin's.

Here is my recipe:

Flour (66% AP; 33% white WW): 100%
Water: 67%
Salt: 2.5%
Shortening: 8.3%
Egg: 16%
Sugar: 5%
Milk Powder: 5%
Starter (@58% hydration): 33%

If .and it is a big if, Bing Translator works …it means Brownman’s sprouted several grain sourdough bread ……( with a yeast water kicker – which isn’t in the name)

I really didn’t think that I could tear Lucy away from her computer this week to come up with a loaf of bread for this Fridays bake. She has been working diligently for a whole week programming something ever since I showed her how to program.

   I've made potato pretzel rolls before and they came out great.  This time I used some fresh milled Durum flour and some fresh ricotta cheese in addition to some rye flour and 00 type flour to make them a little airy.  I probably should have cut back the water around 50 grams but overall these came out real tasty.

I used some cheese and some sesame seeds for topping some of the rolls and traditional pretzel salts as well.

A friend of mine, threw the question of "How could she introduce seeds and grains in bread" to her 11 year old daughter? So I told her, your life saver would be nothing but NUTELLA! (This is what every French kid is eating in France, every morning. My niece was so crazy about it that she basically ate Nutella for breakfast, lunch, tea break and dinner too! I hope she has grown out of this, phew!

Spelt (or dinkel if you are from germany) is such a great grain to use in bread baking.  I am having alot of fun, creating lovely nutty flavoursome bread, this one I made extra crunchy and nutty by adding course grain semolina, walnuts and sunflower seeds.  Its a really tasty spelt bread, all the details can be found on mybreadandbrot.com.  Enjoy.

Which other flavours and add-ins do you TFL folks like to include in spelt bread recipes?

 I am currently working on a 100% whole grain spelt bread with spelt flakes, I hope it will be up next.

2015 Dabrownman’s TFL Blog Index

1/1/2015 - New Years Eve Pizza

1/2/2015 - 50 % Whole Grain Sprouted 8 Grain SD/YW with Japanese Black Rice & Seeds

1/9/2015 - 50 Percent Whole Sprouted 16 Grain SD with Lake Havasu Desert Magic IPA

I decided to have another crack at rye flour but this time I also added a bit of wheat bran to the dough. Here's what I did: 600g bread flour + 70g rye + 30g wheat bran 490g water 15g salt 1/2 tsp instant yeast I mixed everything together and kneaded it for about 10 minutes then refrigerated the dough for almost 20 hours. The next day, I took the dough out of the fridge and divided into to roughly equal pieces. I left them for an hour to come up to room temperature then shaped them into batards.

A friend from other state decided to pay a visit and I was asked if I could bake a sourdough bread for her. Having another opportunity to bake, I said yes of course! Also, this bake would probably be my last experiment on baking with different kind of pots as I have come to the conclusion that a stainless steel pot yields a better result compared to a clay pot. The crust is crunchier and oven spring is good too! This bake has also convinced me to purchase a cast iron Dutch Oven ASAP! No more excuses :)

I've made focaccia just a few times, usually as an afterthought when I had some dough left over from another bake. Frankly, it's never been very good. Today, I made a focaccia that was really good. Really, really good!