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Hello to everyone,

I would like to share with you guys my todays loaf.

I made it with brown flour feed 100% hydration sourdough starer.

Recipe:

375gr strong flour

127gr starter

245gr water

8gr salt

10gr vegetable oil

extra flour for dusting

1. first kneading time is for about 10minute by hand.

2. rest for 4-6hrs.

3. knead back for 10minute again by hand.

4. proof in banneton for 2.5hrs.

This is getting really exciting, beside being a daily food!

I baked this on friday. I stayed upto midnight to get it out of the oven because i don't have a space in my refrigerator for a proved dough.

It is basically a 75% hydration dough with 40% all purpose, 15% Rye, 45%  frshly milled whole hard wheat. The batard was baked under an aluminium foil pan for 25 minutes, and without for 30 minutes, oven door left open at the end of the bake for more crust.

Pain au Levain a la Vanille ( sourdough bread with vanilla )

I recently was gifted some beautiful organic vanilla beans. They have been calling to me from my pantry for a few weeks now. I wanted to incorporate them into some sort of bread but couldn't think of something that would pair well with the vanilla bean and still be good in a bread. I decided to let the smell and taste of vanilla to shine through and just use it on its own. 

Shiao-Ping's excellent post on Mr. Nippon's Baguette formula and the images of her crumb and those in the book inspired me. From what I can tell, the 12 hour cool autolyse as a significant effect on the dough. The dough is sticky as Shiao-Ping cautioned and acted differently from any other 75% hydration dough I have worked with. It was trying to wind it's way up the shaft of the dough hook on my DLX mixer for one thing. It was window paining BEFORE kneading.

Well, here it is!  My first ever blog post.  I have been thinking of starting a blog for awhile, if only to keep a catalog of the progress I've made in my bread making over the last year or so.  It is difficult to quantify progress without something down on paper, as it were, so I hope this will be useful for myself and others, being able to look back through recipes and pictures for future reference.  Anyway, I should give some background on my interest in bread baking.  I am an American living in Britain, and was visiting home for a family wedding over a year ago.

This is a recipe that is one of my favourites at the moment. It's a sourdough that is mainly strong white flour, with rye, kamut and a non-white starter providing some background complexity. It's loosely based on a Dan Lepard recipe for a barley bread, although it has no barley in it. This time I used a used a whole wheat stater, but I have also had success with a rye sour. It's quite a simple recipe but I'm pleased with the results.

The ingredients are:

250g whole wheat or rye starter (approx 100% hydration)

300g strong white flour

100g light rye

It was raining outside my tea room.  Polly my dog was happy in her house.  I was in heaven painstakingly (not contradictory in terms) typing the French letters (the annoying à and é and ç) into my on-line translator.  The music was vibrating the thin rice-paper calligraphies on my mahogany-colored wall.

Hi All,

Just want to start out by thanking both MC, and Shiao-Ping for their detailed postings and directions on making the Gérard Rubaud Miche.

Also, since so many people have tried out this method, I figured that I'd try it out too...  And my hand crank grain mill arrived a few days ago, and today was a snow day, so no work...

Because of the snowstorm, I have been housebound since last Friday so what's  better than playing with flour. I have made Pain de Campagne au Levain in many incarnations using different kind of flour mixes, different types of levain, different dough hydrations, so this time I decided to try another variation using basically all high extraction wheat flour.

This was originally posted on my blog Healthy living, you can see more images there but here is the run down of my day baking.