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                                                       Where there's a will, there's a way.

These past two years I haven't baked much sourdough bread. Since I left Petraia I've been working with a pretty poor oven. But recently a friend inspired me to try baking with a cast-iron combo-cooker. After testing the technique the first thing I did was to pay a visit to the Mulino Marino in Italy's Piedmont region where I have been sourcing flour for over 20 years.  I picked up a supply from their wonderful stone ground range including farro, enkir, macina di grano, burrata, and rye.

This bread takes two days to make and it needs to rest for 24 hours until it can be cut into. You have to prepare 3 different starters (a preferment and two soakers), have to then boil the rye berries, I even had to crack the rye berries using a manual coffee grinder as I couldn't find any cracked rye. Then the loaf needs to bake for 14 hours at a low temperature (yes, you read that right, 14 hours) and rest for another 24, whilst you are out there drooling next to it.

The interesting thing here is that both loaves were from the same dough. You can't really see in the picture but the rise was very different. One proofed in a linen lined bowl and one in a banneton.  The one in the bowl didn't split for some reason and is much smaller.  They smell great though, hopefully they will taste good too.  I took my inspiration from Dani's current and honey loaf. I'm just starting to get brave enough to try putting my own spin on things. 

Fellow weir-doughs, 

Here's a timelapse video I took to evaluate and compare how my sourdough develops when fed with just bread flour, versus 50% BF and 50% rye flour.  I used filtered water. 

/Mark

I was trying to come up with something different when I realised that I some left over mashed potato in the fridge.  So based on dmsnyder's recipe from 31 May 2009 I came up with this:

Bread flour 629 gm

7 grain flour 240 gm

Spelt flour 30 gm

Mashed potato 145 gm

salt 18 gm

water 521 gm

SD levain 198 gm

Ice Demeter gave me a little challenge a couple of weeks ago to get a great crumb etc on a 1 day bake as I did for an overnight poolish. So today I made a variation on Ken Forkish's  Saturday 75% wholewheat bread.  My variation below:

Bread flour (40%) 254 gm

Wholewheat flour (30%) 191 gm

Rye flour (20%) 127 gm

Spelt flour (10%) 64 gm

Water (80%) 487 gm (I kept back 21 gm - should have been 508 gm)

Salt (2%) 14 gm

Instant yeast (0.3%) 2 gm

One of my friends / customers recently had a heart attack and bypass surgery. He loves my bread, but his wife is understandably concerned about his diet, so I created a new bread for them based on some research into diet and cardiovascular health. There is evidence that whole grains, particularly oats, are related to reduced cardiovascular risk. Good fats can be found in olive oil and flax seeds, and sprouted flour and long, slow fermented sourdoughs may also have benefits (at least for digestibility if not heart health). Here's what I came up with:

If you like the flavor of licorice in jelly beans or fennel in sausages, you may like ground anise in breads too. I have not used anise seeds before in breads. But, why not? This unique and warm spice enlivens the fig and hazelnut bread. For the start, the sweetness of dried figs and the smoky nutty notes of roasted hazelnuts bring big flavor to the bread. Just the right amount. The surprising finish of anise is merely the icing on the cake, I mean, the bread. There is just so much to like about this bread.

Last week was another busy week with a high need for sandwich bread and not a lot of time to make it.  It was also still stupidly hot (27 deg C or more), and continuously hazy / smoky from all of the fires off to the west and south.  We don’t have air-conditioning, and opening the windows was questionable, so I needed to plan leaven amounts and refrigeration for best bake timing.