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This levain was originally made to have pizza on Friday night but it was put off until Saturday so it spent an unplanned day in the fridge. It didn’t seem to mind much though.  This YW levain was different in that Lucy added a pinch of ADY to it and some of the left over 15% sifted out portion from the Plotziade bake on Friday.

The wife's more plain pie.

I based my formula on Reinhart's. I used a Biga and let it proof in the fridge for 20 hours then mixed by hand. S&F every 30 min for 2 hours, bench rest for 30 minutes then shape and bench proofed for one hour.

Baked on pizza stone with steam at 480F

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Lucy was really depressed this week.  It was the first time in along time my Baking Apprentice 2nd Class couldn’t come up with her own recipe for the Friday Bake.  She was also more than a little surprised that the Plotziade Olympic Bread was not the full flavored pumpernickel of her Black Forest youth .

While I'm raising my first sourdough starter, it won't be ready for another week or so,

I thought I'd try a loaf with a little Rye and Whole wheat.

My "formula" was:

40g Rye flour

40g Whole Wheat flour

420g KA Bread flour

350g water

10g salt

1/4 tsp dry active yeast

-Autolyse for 30 min

What an interesting and tasty experiment. I usually don't  bulk ferment my dough but I decided to try it due to time and space constraints. I made the dough and did a couple s &f's q 20 min .then rest for 1 1/2 hrs then in the fridge it went. I removed it this AM and shaped cold. I always shape cold when I make Ian's buns and love the way the cold dough feels and handles. I made 3/650g boules. It is incredibly easy to shape and get the "free form" burst when the dough is cold as it doesn't really want to stick terribly well. Into the banneton and rising time of 2 1/2 hrs.

For the past few weeks I've been in my native homeland of New Hampshire visiting my folks. And  being in the north east in the early spring means maple sugar. Some of our family friends have a sugar shack and I went and visited and got some of the sap, One batch I made from full on raw maple sap, then the other batch was made with sap that had been run through their reverse osmosis machine. 

The full loaf in the title image is the one with plain sap 

Well, I kind of screwed up today, but did my best to make up for it.  When I was making the Gluten-free Farmhouse bread earlier, i prepared too much yeast because I thought I really messed up the bread dough, but it turned out that I didn't!  As a result, I quickly found the most simple recipe for yeasted French bread and threw it together in minutes and baked it this afternoon.  It was really good!  My husband liked the crust.  I could have done a much better job on the shaping, however.  I'll do better next time.

I am always looking for good gluten-free recipes, and I came across this one online by Ali and Tom of Whole Life Nutrition.  I did make a number of modifications to the recipe after the first time I made it, which I have listed below.  It is a very dense, heavy bread and uses ground chia seeds and psyllium husk as the gluten-like substances.

Being a pastry chef by trade, hazelnut is a fundamental ingredient in my repertoire. Yet it seems a bridesmaid to Walnuts in conventional bread making. While devising a baking menu for an upcoming job I decided to feature a hazelnut bread as my nut based loaf. The difficulty in using hazelnuts is that their flavor is semi subtle and must be exaggerated through other ingredients which in pastry is most commonly done with brown butter, caramel or an earthy chocolate.

/* UPDATE: Der deutsche Text ist am Ende dieses Beitrags */

Karin (Hanseata) pointed us to a blog event that is currently on, closing on April 17:

The challenge is an interesting one.