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I wanted to make a special bread for Christmas and the Lithuanian Christmas Bread from Stanley Ginsberg’s The Rye Baker fit the bill. The bread is 100% rye and has a whopping 45% fruit added (prunes, apricots, and raisins). The recipe specifies 76% white rye and 24% medium rye. I don’t have any white rye flour so I made it with all medium rye (King Arthur) and increased the hydration from 70% to 75% to compensate.

Today's exercise.

Brooklyn style, Sicilian stuffed pizza. Sausage roll/chicken roll. 

2.0 The second time, much better than the first time. 

I've done 25 panettone bakes this year, according to my records! How the time, and panettone, flies. Looking back on the year, I've studied, taken classes, tried numerous techniques affecting each stage of product. There have been successes and a few (thankfully) failures, bright ideas and "Oops" moments. 

My first bake since returning home for us, although I made two, one is for a present.  We love seeds and nuts in bread so wanted to have a nutty bread.  I toasted the walnuts and also used toasted walnut oil in lieu of butter to maximize the nutty flavour.  I also last minute decided to top the loaves with black sesame seeds because why not!  I usually weigh the dough when I divide, this time I did not and obviously didn’t do a good job by eye LOL.

We bought a lot of Turkish black olives last week and I thought finally it's time to bake olive bread.

I love how artisan bread gives you the opportunity to do something creative with your scoring. I think Santa is my favorite—he got the full glamour shot treatment! 🎅🏻 

First post!! 

I'm so excited to have found a cool community where I can talk/read about baking bread without an algorithm to decide to put other random crap in front of my face.

Anyhoo!

I use a pretty basic sandwich bread recipe for pretty much all the bread I've ever made

Warm water and honey to bloom the dry active yeast

Butter, flour, salt to form the dough. 

This time around, I made a loaf with a swirl of bacon bits and shredded cheese! It was a massive hit and we used it to make breakfast sandwiches the next day. 

So I needed to bake more presents and planned to repeat my star shaped bake, but last minute decided to use a more traditional rolled bun shaping.  I also made some creamed cheese icing to top these.  My partner and I got to quality control this bake as I cut one bun out and can report that they are quite yummy.  although you definitely get the cinnamon, the ginger carries through the finish.  As expected, the crumb is fluffy, shreddable and so soft.  I’ll keep this recipe for another Christmas to bake again.

I’ve wanted to make a bread done with this star shaping for quite sometime so decided that Christmas baking was the perfect time to try it out.  It is fun and pretty easy overall to do.  Because I needed this to be done fairly quickly I didn’t convert this recipe to sourdough and instead just used IDY.

Formula: