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After a long absence from baking due to visitors, travel and so on, I have gotten away from baking my own bread. With the winter months and some insanely cold weather in these parts it seemed like a good time to fire the oven up. I used 2 Tbs of dehydrated onion and enough water to make the dough plus some which will get absorbed. the soaking water was used in the dough -- of course! As I am in a very dry environment I upped the hydration to 70% and used a little more egg than recommended, but this dough made great tasting buns and was a dream to work.

The nights are getting colder here, my thoughts have been turning to overnight outdoor proofing schemes. 
For this bread, I started with a 45 min. autolyse, then minimal machine mixing in stages. The bulk  ferment was in the five hour range.
The loaves spent the night, seam down in baskets, and coved up inside of a large plastic box outside in the cold.
Outside the temp. dropped to +5c, I suspect that inside the box it was closer to +9.

Cari Amici,

volevo condividere con tutti voi questo delizioso dolcetto con il quale molto spesso io e la mia famiglia, facciamo colazione.

E' un prodotto dal gusto straordinario ed i colori dati dalla frutta secca e candita, ne rendono accattivante anche la presentazione.

Durante le festività natalizie è mia consuetudine metterli in sacchetti trasparenti, chiudere il tutto con un bel nastro e farne dono alle persone amiche.

Mi auguro che piaccia anche a tutti voi.

Vi auguro una buona giornata, a presto, Anna

Revisited this recipe which was posted on TFL by Dolf I believe.  I substituted 50:50 wholewheat:bread flour as I cant find white wholewheat flour.  I also reduced honey a little.  Very happy how it turned out. First time I have rolled top of loaf in grain too. 

Like others here I baked a few rounds of basic batards for use in stuffing and bread pudding.

They all used my wheat and rye starters and had a long fermentation. No pressure on these since they just cut all cut and set to dry for a couple days. Definitely improves the taste of things that requires some bread.

A month has blown by since the last time I posted here.  With good reason: we spent most of November in Europe visiting my wife's family.  

We had a couple of days in London:

The rest in Warszawa...

This bake was loosely based on Reinhart's recipe in his new book "Bread Revolution" however I wanted to tweak it for my personal tastes to make them more tasty and maybe just a touch healthier.  

For this recipe I have used sprouted spelt rather than wheat. Here are my other changes:

This is the kind of crumb that I LOVE.

I am not a fan of those big holes in the bread, after all, you can not eat holes ;)

I of course understand that taste differs.

Have a lovely Sunday and HAPPY BAKING.

Adapted from Susan's Norwich Sourdough recipe for this weekend's bake. Looking better and can't wait to cut into it.

I guess it happens once in a blue moon... forgot something cos you didnt gather all the components together. The only thing that saved these batards were the sundried tomatoes that were added in and the little shower of salt that went on top as an afterthought. They were bulk fermented and proofed cold more by necessity than by design so could have helped slow down the yeast activity. Certainly the appearance is distinctly duller than normal,  lacking the sheen that comes i think from a certain degree of caramelization.. That was SD with sweet raisins sundried tomatoes and thyme..