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Baked another Tartine loaf with increased hydration, looking for the perfect crumb (which, of course, can never be achieved!)  We had this loaf for lunch with my husband's sister and her husband, Bob the baker from England.  They leave today, so we enjoyed lunch outside in the California sun.  Bob gave the bread passing marks. They return to Liverpool (and a bit of rain) this afternoon.  They did have rain here and in Las Vegas during their visit.

This is a 100% whole wheat sourdough bread with lots of nuts and seeds mixed in (walnuts, almonds, cashews, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds).

I have recently taken a personal chef type endeavor, not like a gourmet chef, where I show up with wonderful ingredients and fix a 5 course meal. It's more of a I show up in your kitchen and fix dinner out of whatever I find in your kitchen. It's a hey everybody, grandma's going to come and fix us dinner kind of a thing.

Having benefited from the collective wisdom of other Fresh Loafers for a while, I thought it was time to make a contribution. This bread is a sourdough adaptation of a straight-dough whole-wheat multigrain loaf with honey and dried malt that my much-loved late father-in-law used to make with a bread machine.

Okay, I couldn't resist, I know its corny.

I've now baked twice the Black Hamster Bread recipe from Ketex, to me this is a Schwarzbrot or black bread.

The first attempt was problematic -

Too much yeast, this coupled with the starter and the bread began rising too quickly

Hydration level was way overboard - as I cut into the bread the knife had streams (yuck!)

I wasn't happy with the high/fast bake time, I felt this contributed to the wet doughy first trial

It seems ever since Sylvia posted her fine calzones we haven’t had pizza night but have calzone night instead.  We like both my daughter loves seasoned ricotta and that is a calzone ingredient if there ever was one.  You could say that our calzones are a cross between lasagna and pizza.

A little over a year ago, I read on this site (here) about PiPs' wonderful find of a Raadvad Danish bread slicer. I saw that post and was filled with envy. Of course, I immediately searched online for one. A few were available on some auction sites, but for very high prices (and most won't ship internationally, either). 

After years of gawking at some croissant-centric blogs (*ahem* txfarmer's and weekendbakery), I decided to conquer, once and for all, my biggest fear in all of baking. I've been using weekend bakery's recipe, and for the most part, it has been great. 1st attempt was a success, 2nd was a disaster, and 3rd was pretty good again. My biggest problem, however, is trying to get consistent and even honeycomb structure with each croissant. Seems like I would only get 2-3 perfect croissant per batch. Any tips/pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Well I have milled some fresh Kamut for my 100% Kamut loaf and have given a it a couple goes so far.  The first resulted in a very flat pancake but round 2 went better.  Probably take a couple more goes before I'm ready for the test of repeated success but If my next attempts improve like take 1 to take 2 I'm well on my way.  It's a tricky flour with lots of extensability and fragile gluten.  For this project I've added a third to the family.

So I figured after 6+ years of dedicated TFL reading & researching, I'd finally start providing a bit of content to the discussion.  Below is a grab bag of recent bread experiments to get caught up, with precious little commentary, for which I apologize in advance.  Happy to answer any questions, of course, and in the future, I'll try to post one or two such experiments at a time, with a bit of explanation of what I was attempting.

Cheers, Drew 

Pain au levain (FWSY recipe)

I am always trying to get bigger holes, so I experimented with a bit more hydration.  The stakes were high as my sister-in-law and brother-in-law are visiting from England, and Bob was a baker for more than 30 years!

They seemed to enjoy it.  We had lunch outside on the patio.  The crumb was good, but I am always looking to improve.