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Maggie Glezer's book, "A Blessing of Bread," is a wonderful collection of Jewish baking from around the world along with a sort of ethnography of baking in the Jewish communities of the Diaspora. This book has, by my count, about 40 recipes for challah, the bread particularly associated with the Jewish sabbath. But the author also identifies the challah recipe she makes for her own family. As with most of her recipes, she provides both a commercially yeasted and a sourdough version (without saying which her family prefers).

I did a lot of holiday baking this year, and part of that was gifting out bread. I made milk bread and potato bread.

This is the most even my milk bread has looked. I always weight each section, but this time, I was more careful about shaping the dough into rectangles before rolling them up, and that really helped.

I recently discovered a fantastic Youtube Channel called Tasting History, in which the host presents recipes from across history. In one such video, linked here, he describes the Sally Lunn Bun, a traditional bun made in Bath, England.

After seeing the video, I decided to try them for myself. The recipe is very straightforward. The only part that takes some extra attention is warming the milk and combining in the sugar and butter.

Ingredients:

This summer, while social distancing in our cabin, I purchased a small wood fired pizza oven where I practiced applying my sourdough starter to making sourdough pizza.  At temperatures between 900F and 1000F (the later being "Hi" or my IR gun) the challenge is to continuously rotate the pizza to keep things from burning while ensuring the top and bottom cook evenly in 1 or 2 minutes.  In addition, chopping lots of tiny hardwood pieces of the precise size needed to keep the little firebox roaring adds to the list of chores.  Our felled locust burns very hot and works exception

This is the first bread I made using my new Ankarsrum mixer.  My wife surprised me with it for a Hanukkah/Christmas present.  I have been using the Bosch Universal for many years and loved it, but a while ago a piece on the base broke off and the bowl does not seat properly.  There is no way to fix it other than buying a used one especially since they just updated the model recently.

These cakes were made and raised purely with sourdough. In recent years, I have this knack for seizing every opportunity to showcase the versatility of sourdough. Inspired by our native cakes, I researched ancient and vintage recipes and this is what I came up with along with a fair share of failures. Using relative measurements and knowing when and how to adjust, now I can say that I already got the "feel" for making this cakes. I have posted similar stuff which you can find on my blog if you are interested but there are no exact recipes. :)

I’m closing the year out by baking these baguettes.  I spent a good part of the summer and into fall learning how to bake baguettes with a ton of help from Alan, Don, Doc and Danny and I’d like to thank them for helping me to learn how to make these.  I doubt I would even have tried had it not been for their prodding and the Community Bake.

The details of my formula are In this link.

This week I followed David and baked this beautiful bread. It uses buttermilk in place of water other than for the levain. I made the levain two days before using it. This bread has a super soft crumb and notwithstanding the dark colour (from the buttermilk) the crust is delicate. The tang from the rye sour, buttermilk and long ferment make this (for me) an instant classic. It's truly a beautiful bread and worth trying.

I have been trying to make good broccoli cheddar soup for years. I was always disappointed with the results. FINALLY, the stars aligned and I had both an excellent broccoli cheddar soup AND great tasting and great looking bread bowls to boot.

Bread Bowl Ingredients

It's gonna be 2021 here in a few minutes and this is my mandatory yearend post. It has been a difficult time we have all been through. It changed our lives and left us in uncertainty but there is still that glimmer of hope. I wish all of us a better and blessed 2021.

Here is what I made today.