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Today's planned experiment was adding vital wheat gluten (hoping for more rise and softer crumb). The unplanned one was baking the double batch of dough as one huge loaf. i don't know what I was thinking. 

It was over 2kg of dough. The largest loaf I've attempted. Almost a miche? Ok, maybe it doesn't qualify cos it's oval and has too many ingredients. It had to be oval to fit in my oven. (Sigh. One day. Everyone has a Grail Loaf, right?)

I mainly use chakki atta flour because it's inexpensive and easy to get. In 10kg bags too. And the mill is almost local to where I live. My bread is slowly improving in spite of my lack of skills - by changing just one thing each time I bake. In this version I added olive oil. I'm hoping for fluffy-ish. One day.

800g water

1000g chakki atta flour (Gingin Flour Mill)

0.5 tsp diastatic malt 

1.5 tsp salt

200g starter

2 tbsp olive oil 

0.5 cup mixed oats and seeds

This year I have been baking a great deal more Whole Grain bread, and I have been intrigued especially by the work of danni3ll3.  I have several bakes from her blog in my bookmarks.  This is based fairly closely on one of them.  There are some variations though:  I had no Spelt grain or flour, so I left it out and made up the weight in the Red Fife.  I used low fat yogurt since that is what I had.

I was not originally planning on using my pullman pan for this bake, but with the high percentage of rye and spelt fresh-milled flour in this bake, there was no chance of getting this into anything else to bake.

I used fresh milled Ryman Rye from Barton Springs Mill along with some fresh milled spelt. Both were sifted once with a #30 drum sieve and re-milled at the finest setting in my MockMill 200.

I decided to do a scald, which provides added plasticity to the crust and crumb. It also tends to make the crumb softer. I used fresh-milled Ryman Rye that was not sifted.

The only store-bought flour used in this bake was the small amount from the seed starter to make the levain. I wanted to use as close to 100% fresh-milled flour as I could. Barton Springs Mill, Butler’s Gold whole wheat berries, and Blue Hopi corn were used in this bake. The results were pretty good. The dough fermented a little too long during bulk, and there was not much oven spring or refrigerator rise either.

I used my new, smaller-sized square bannetons, and I could have definitely used more dough in each basket. Next time, I will up the overall dough amount.

The recipe for this bread comes from That Sourdough Gal: https://thatsourdoughgal.com. I followed it almost exactly as written, but my bulk fermentation was much shorter than hers. The taste and texture of this bread is wonderful. I really recommend this formula.

I'm embarassed to admit it took 7 batches of trials just for cinnamon rolls lol. Don't get me wrong. Although I did some dough-related tweaks, it was designing the filling and topping that gave me headache.

And look at the cute shape! I almost changed the watermark to I-just-hit-puberty. by Jay 😆 lol

I love cinnamon rolls, but there are several things that I perceive as product flaws to the classic ones that I wanted to address (along with the tweaks):

For our dinner party tonight we will be seeing from friends from Fort Lauderdale Florida who we won’t see very often anymore since we sold our apartment there.  So I had a busy baking weekend to ensure that they have a good meal at our place.  I have made this cake once before, but having made this once, I made some improvements on it.

This is the best sourdough focaccia that I’ve baked.  Over the years the few times I’ve baked focaccia, a majority of the time I’ve either had too much or too little dough.  In retrospect, I think I’d been underfermenting as well.  For my 9x13” pan I made 750 g of dough and allowed it to ferment until it had a total rise of 170% which is far more than I have in the past.  Without having sliced it to peer at the crumb, this is the best looking focaccia out of my oven with nice big bubbles and I think the right thickness.

Made with fresh milled durum and Star Dust whole wheat. I added some Italian-style fresh ricotta for softness and some honey for a little sweetness.

Pecans were chopped roughly and added at the end of mixing. I probably should have laminated the pecans in which would have distributed them more evenly, but I chose to be lazy :).