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Doing some baking experiments with portugese sweet bread from "Advanced Bread and Pastry" book. This bake, I could of waited an additional hour or so but was pressed for time. The dough can triple+ in size during it's final proof. I filled these bread with ghiridelli chocolate chips and walnuts. Next bake, I will proof more and add more chocolate! The topping is some pearl sugar.

I

I called this horse bread  due to the fact that a number of the ingrediants are easily obtained from stockfeed stores catering for the horse people. There was some discussion on the availability or lack of Molasses in another topic on TFL. For this bread i got my daughter to pick up 2 litres of molasses from the rural store when she was picking up her bales of hay for the nags.

The first one is Alsace loaf with Rye from Dan Lepard's book "A handmade loaf". Recipe can be found online here: http://blog.rezkonv.de/2007/08/31/alsace-loaf-with-rye/ , but of course I have the book and love it.

They just didn't want to be baguettes!

I took the recipe under Metric and divided by 20 to use 500g total flour in the recipe.  I did make some changes... I added an egg white into the water to total 165g in the final dough.  I used 1/2 tsp of yeast in the final dough.  This gave me longer fermentation.  I also hand mixed the dough.

Today I made Hamelman's poolish baguettes.   Which retaught me a lesson I've already learned which is that making baguettes is hard.   A month or two ago, I tried the Bouabsa formula several times, without having any idea that it wasn't reasonable to start one's baguette making career with that, so I backed off to Hamelman which I think is quite delicious in its own right.   But it is still hard for the novice bread baker.  

From this side it doesn't look so bad -

I have blogged about baking Pretzels before and this time I had one concern I wanted to be able to improve on-shape. Turns out two improvements were made and I will need expert baker's help to determine what is responsible for the slight texture change -which in my eyes made them perfect!

Hi All,

Just wanted to tease you a little with what I'm working on right now. 

100% Hydration 100% Whole Wheat No Knead Bread

Ingredients:

450g WW (Gold Medal)

50g Malted Barley Flour

100g Firm SD Starter (60% hydr)

500g Water

10g Kosher Salt

1/8 tsp ADY

1111 Total Dough Yield

Process

3:15pm - Mix all ingredients in large mixing bowl with wooden spoon, cover let rest.

Lest any of you consider that my life is all flights across the Pacific and raw squid for breakfast, I recently found myself in driving (in my little green convertible - top down - adorned with my "I Love Okinawa" magnet) from Colorado's Front Range to the great wheat growing region of Kansas for a tour of the Heartland Mill in Marienthall, KS.

Monday:  My garden is bursting with Spring!  The wind is windy and the birds are joyful!  We have 18°C and the furnace has been turned off.  I've pulled a starter out of the fridge.   A firm rye that was not put into long hybernation (do not fear, my pretties, the prepared starter is the jar next to it also looking none the worse from wear.)  It's wonderful and exhausting to be back in Austria.  Lots of garden work and getting used to stairs again.  Back to the starter.

I just thought I would share this! It's a speech about bread that Peter Reinhart did at google's headquarters. I was really suprised to see that he used one of Dante Alighieri's allegories! Peter is such a gifted baker, writer, and rhetorician!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5mC_SkIPI&feature=related