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I spent some time in the kitchen this weekend. I was baking bread and establishing a separate starter that wouldn't see the inside of the refrigerator until the last loaves were done. There was also a fair amount of cleanup after the flour flew. The first loaf was out of the oven on Friday morning was another attempt at an Anadama Bread that turned out well, just not too open in the crumb.

I baked Sicilian Semolina Bread from D T. DiMuzio's book 'breadbaking' tweaking the formula and fermentation of the biga to adjust to my time schdule for wfo baking.  I also made a fresh peach and blueberry Breakfast Tart with a Pate A Foncer crust and Almond Cream from M. Suas AB&P book with some tweaks again with ingredients and for wfo baking.  The pizza's where Margherita pizza and a fresh homemade pesto sauce and shrimp pizza.  I baked the pizza's in a very hot oven.  When baking pizza fast apx. 2min.

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Find more recipes on my blog Dessert Before Dinner

This weekend, I made two of the pains au levain from Hamelman's Bread - The Pain au Levain, which Hamelman says is typically French, and the Pain Au Levain with Mixed Starters, which is made with both a white liquid starter and a rye starter. This bread also contains some whole wheat flour in the final dough.

Pain au Levain

Loosely based on the formula for Le pavé d’autrefois
(Old fashioned slab) in the book,  Le Pain, l’envers du décor (Bread, behind the scenes) by Frédéric Lalos.

His version used commercial yeast and a poolish.

Ingredients:

Levain:

100% hydration fed with KA Bread flour – 300g

Soaker:

Water – 564g

KA Whole Wheat flour – 107g

I have been thinking about making challah for a while now. I do like proper Jewish challah, with its lovely soft and buttery texture, seeing the actual folds and strands in each slice. I have tried making challah twice before with mixed results – this time I’ve decided to make up my own recipe, roughly based on my previous attempts, pure sourdough, with saffron and vanilla.

“NINE FOR THE SHOW”

I have not made any bread blogs for a while now, as i was moving to a another apartment.

Yesterday, i saw a bag of sifted wholewheat flour (truns out to be a high extraction, as i was unable to get rid of tiny bran and germ particles through my sifter), and decided to bake PR's wholewheat sandwich loaf from it (Found in Whole grain breads book).

Cat and I don’t throw dinner parties very often, but when we do we are reminded that we are pretty dang good at it.  And now that I have become a semi-competent baker, the parties are even better.