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It's been a while since I last posted, so I wanted to share some photos from this weekend's bakes.  A small get together with some friends always inspires me to bake a mix of some new breads and some standards. Clockwise from the left are: Royal Crown's Tortano (from Glezer's Artisan Baking in America), a caramelized onion focaccia (made with flour I brought back from Italy last fall), two boules of Pane di Altamura (more on this later) and three loaves of my go-to spelt sourdough.

Never one to leave well enough alone, I am on a quest for a favorite roll recipe.  I have been making the Weitzen Broetchen recipe posted on hanseata’s blog and nicely done in a video by Avioli  Breadlabs for quite some time to the delight of family and friends.  A local German master chef told me “these were the best buns he has had in a long long time since the old country”.  So thank you hanseata for the recipe.

Got the einkorn berries Friday so the experimenting begins. 350g were milled with a high speed mill 335g came out the rest being stuck on every available surface of the mill to the point that it had to be washed instead of brushed off like usual. The flour was fluffier than the white wheat that is my standard. I'd show you a picture but can't figure how to do it.

 This is my first bake after returning from a nice 10 day excursion to China and Taiwan for business.  My starter is not in a good mood right now so instant yeast was in order.

I decided to use some of the freshly sprouted whole wheat and durum flour that I had prepared before I left for my trip.  I used 81% sprouted flour in this bake along with a little bread flour to give it a little strength.

Practicing dough handling before working on another batch of baguettes.  My sourdough starter became quite crazy active after I switched it's last feeding from the generic AP I've been using to KAF AP so I tried a simple sourdough recipe to test it out.

http://stellaculinary.com/recipes/70-hydration-sourdough-boule

I am fairly new to baking my own bread, and currently use reasonably basic yeasted recipes, as I haven't yet progressed to making my own sourdoughs.

I like mixing flours, but normally use a base of high protein (14.8%) Canadian White Wheat Flour, which I'm able to buy from my local supermarket, in fact it's the supermarket's own brand. I normally mix it with varying amounts of either Spelt, Rye or Multigrain flours I have also tried various liquid ingredients, such as cultured Buttermilk, Beer and now Carrot juice. in order to create some different flavours.

What did you expect? :)

In the spirit of a few of David's recent bakes, these were loosely based on a bunch of stuff in FWSY, with some last minute stuff from TFL.

If memory serves:

400g KA AP
25g KA WW
25g Bob's Red Mill dark rye 
100g 100% SD starter (didn't build a levain, just dumped in from the feeding discard)
~0.5g IDY (insurance policy :)
11g salt
375g water (a guess based on flour mix and starter amount)

Sour Cherry

Strawberry Rhubarb

This week, I baked a batch of SJSD baguettes. They aren't the prettiest I've ever baked, but I'll post a couple photos of mine, since there have been so many folks baking these and enjoying them recently.

Baguette is one of my favorites, but I have not got it quite right ... yet. 

I followed the authentic baguette recipe from Cook's Illustrated with the MegaSteam method. Based on the result, I think it was a nice try. I let the steaming going for too long, so the crust was a bit too thick. Of course more practices are needed for scoring ;P