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In my last post, [url=http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12378/french-sourdough-breads-japan-and-quotvariety-breadsquot#comments/][color=blue]French sourdough breads in Japan? ...

Hi, there!

I've been watching all this great content about bread making and have long wanted to participate in the discussions. I have been interested in baking bread for a long time and had taken some commercial bread making classes back in the Philippines, as well as some personal lessons from my old aunt who is a nun. It has best remained as a hobby for me till I got to Singapore where I wet my feet again. The Fresh Loaf site is quite inspiring and I have shared your site with some of my officemates. And yes, they get surprised that a guy like me is into baking.

I hope I'm not the only one who does some strange experiments?  Like useing frozen pizza dough for a pate fermentee!!  I made french bread and another Daisy Ring yeasted coffee cake this time with Almond Paste filling.  They both tasted very good, lots of pleasing flavors in the both the bread and the yeasted coffee cake!

I heated my Kamado to 700ºF.  I used the temperature gauge on the Kamado to get an idea of inside temperature.  I placed one stone under my main grill to create an indirect baking oven.  Next I placed my rectangular baking stone on my main grill where I would do my pizza baking.  I used an infrared temperature thermometer to make measurements of the stone temperature.  The pizza dough recipe came from the King Arthur Flour website.

Picture of the bake follow.

I followed the 2nd recipe on davidg618's post "Adjusting Sourdough Starter" which allows a pure sourdough baked bread to be finished within 6 hours.  This is the first time that I could bake a sourdough bread with some height.  All my past ones were flat because they spreaded sideways once they were released from the form they were final-proofing in.  Also, the colour of the crumb is no longer greyish. 

Here is how it looks like

Last bread for the day - Polish Cottage Rye from Leader's "Local Breads." This is another of my personal favorites. Today, I made it with a rye sour fed with whole rye rather than the white rye Leader calls for. I like it both ways.

David

Hello everyone, I've been trolling around here for a while and I decided its time to finally post something. This is my version of soft pretzels. For the formula and details, check out my blog , The Bread Portal. This is very similar to the Pretzel formula post in the "Favorite Reciptes" section of this blog.

The "San Joaquin Sourdough" is my own recipe. It evolved through multiple iterations from Anis Bouabsa's formula for baguettes. Most of my deviations developed in discussion here on TFL with Janedo, who first suggested adding sourdough starter and rye, and, then, leaving out the baker's yeast and making it as a "pure" pain au levain.

I got a pretty nice ear and grigne on this one.

SusanFNP's "Norwich Sourdough" is her adaptation of Hamelman's Vermont Sourdough from his book, "Bread." The recipe can be found on Wildyeastblog.com, Susan's wonderful baking blog, under "My New Favorite Sourdough.". 

The method of these two sourdough breads came from Bolangerie Comme Chinois' head chef, Nishikawa Takaaki, in Kobe, Japan.  His most recent cook, "Varie" (i.e., variety breads) is one of the most amazing books of modern French breads I have ever read.  For over many decades Japan has had dedicated chefs working and training in France; they then went back to Japan to not only spread the French bread culture but also to enrich their own.   The breads and pastry shops in Japan are simply wonderful.  In 2002 Japan won the tri