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This month we are calling Retro Supper Month... mid week we are getting together to make a "50-60s" Supper and then having the good old fashioned leftovers... or re-purposed meals to fill out the week... All the meals have a dessert but some might or might not have breads, depending on how the week is going, whether Lucy has visited our kitchens and whether our memories have put the ingredients on the shopping lists...to recap a bit... the first week of February we made...

The other day I made Rene's Rye from the recently released Tartine 3. The primary flour is spelt, combined with sprouted rye.  I have a sprouter I use for salad sprouts and was able to get nice shoots on my rye berries in less than 2 days. The recipe also requires buttermilk (the taste is pronounced, so use a good one), malt syrup and dark beer (I substituted maple syrup and a hoppy IPA) and a variety of seeds.

crumb shot of a SD coffee baguette. I upped the coffee intensity after the last loaf and other than the deeper gorgeous colour, the flavour is just amazing!! i am hooked on this coffee phase - and i have to say, the final loaves are also softer/ more moist. and also, after a brilliant suggestion from DavidEF, have also begin maintaining a starter fed with flour and COFFEE!

Pizza made with Sourdough Starter Discard

February 14, 2014

I ended up this week with even more sourdough starter discard than usual and a craving for pizza and no activated starter and it's Valentine's Day and my wife loves pizza and so I made pizza with the sourdough starter discard.

Thought I'd start documenting my bread adventures, seeing as I'd finally got hold of a set of digital scales. I usually make a very soft sandwich bread, so my first attempt at ciabatta had me instinctively disregarding the instructions and kneading my 75% hydration dough to a strong windowpane...with the result of sandwich bread in a ciabatta shape. So this is my second attempt at ciabatta (in which I meekly obey instructions to just do stretch and folds during the bulk rise).

You probably know by now that finding the right kind of flour is a very important task.  Using predictable, good quality flour is key in getting predictable, good quality bread loaves day after day.  The task becomes doubly challenging if you are trying to stay away from mystery wheat, GMO, bleached, bromated and “enriched” goodness that’s being sold in most stores.

Ever since Josh posted his Market Week 6 of Pane Maggiore, (modified for more whole grains on his week 24 post) we knew Lucy  had to make this bread some way to get a chance to taste it but, since it was Valentine’s Day she decided to make it two ways.  Here are those 2 posts

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/33950/farmers-market-week-6-pane-maggiore

I usually don't make a lot of sweets, but I did so today. Cheated in that I did not make the pastry dough.  I did make the Tartine bread today, and that was from scratch!  The mini-pie tarts are stuffed with chocolate (Nutella) and cherry preserves and covered in a pink glaze with red sparkly sugar.  Very easy.

If you’ve been following my blog, you should know very well by now that I am a big fan of home made bread.  I’ve been baking my own wild sourdough bread for a few years now (thanks to my friend Rimma, who showed me the light), wrote about it plenty, and took some pretty decent pictures.

Bread friends:  I am very excited about my second Tartine loaf.  As you may recall, my first one was nice, but I was disappointed with the crumb.  I just took this out of the oven, so will cut it later when it cools.  I actually started in on Wednesday and then forgot that I had to be out quite a lot yesterday, so I had my husband do a number of the turns for me.  Let's hope our joint effort is one to be proud of!  Phyllis