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Hi all - pizza time!

I've been making pizza for a couple of years now, it's been an uphill battle at times but am now in a position where i'm "comfortable" inviting friends round and baking pizza - which in fairness I guess was always my goal.

After trying many (and I mean many!) dough recipes, this is by far my favourite and it's taken from Tony Gemignani's "The Pizza Bible" book. It makes simply the best pizza (my wife disagrees, she prefers a much more crips and thin base with no lovely scrumptious dough handle around the rim).

   This is the softest crumb of any bread I've made to date.  The combination of the porridge, cream cheese and potatoes made this one soft like a "pillow".  The taste was fantastic with the combination of 5 different flours.

If you decide to try this one, make sure to leave the skins on the potatoes when you mash them up.  This really gives some added texture and flavor to the bread.  I left the potatoes chunky on this one and you can see some of the potato chunks of flavorful goodness in the crumb and the crust.

This loaf really surprised me! The carrot juice doesn't make it sweet, which was my fear. The recipe produced a nice savory and complex loaf. I added the turmeric and black pepper for the health benefits. 

I also filmed another video documenting the process! I added a soundtrack that my friend made for the video. She made the music using sounds from my kitchen (ie, the stove burner turning on, a knife against a cutting board etc). It's pretty cool, you guys should check it out! 

Now here come the pictures (you guys know how much I love my pictures haha),

Apparently ‘tis the season for clan gatherings – and the associated baking.  Fortunately, the weather is pretty nice for it (I’d much rather be working in an 18 - 20 deg C kitchen instead of 30), and it gives me an opportunity to indulge my obsession without over-filling the freezer ;-)

So – it seems that I have succumbed to the siren song of the baguette…

 Round 1 last week turned out better than I had expected, and the non-traditional blend of flours that I chose was both a treat to work with and absolutely delicious.  The spelt / durum / rye diluted the strong gluten of my Canadian AP flour, so the dough ended up wonderfully extensible, and quite fun to shape. 

So I thought I'd experiment a little and try a rye flour. I'm a very amateur baker so please bare with me if my terms aren't the correct ones!

Starter:
50g canadian flour (14.2% protein) - bought from Sainsbury's, UK
50g water

I left this for 10 days, halving it every day and replacing that with fresh flour and water.

Bread:
350g Dove's Farm White Rye Flour
100g Canadian White Flour
100g of my above starter
300ml water
10g salt

A bread to use up some ingredients I had in the cupboard... I'm actually not a big fan of cranberries, but I had made a promise to an Italian friend for mince pies with homemade filling, and they were left over. (Also left over from the mincemeat is 3/4 of a bottle of brandy hooray).

I made a large loaf, unwise perhaps as I won't have much help eating it.

This sounded so good when Ian postedit I couldn't resist. I only made one 750g loaf so recipe is scaled. I couldn't get barley flakes so I used an additional portion of rolled oats. As I only had jumbo rolled oats I roughly chopped them before making the porridge. I used frozen cherries, defrosted & drained.

ok, so this weekend I decided that I had to try Ian's pecan cherry cranberry porridge bread. I would build some  levain but I would have a bit more than needed so decided to add in a 1:2:3 loaf using up some flours in the freezer. Ok I also decided to have a go at hamburger buns, and then at the last minute decided to add baguettes to the mix! as I say - rocks in my head...

This post is about the baguettes and hamburgers (will do a sepatate one for the SD loaves).

   I don't like drinking coffee, but I do like the flavor in food including bread.  I thought the nice nutty flavor of freshly ground and sifted spelt flour would go well with the earthy coffee flavors and I wasn't mistaken.

I added some Greek Yogurt to soften the crumb a bit and also some real Vermont Maple Syrup to add a touch of sweetness.

This ended up with a nice subtle coffee flavor and tasted as good as I expected.  The crumb was moderately open and soft as desired.