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So I have not made any sourdough in months and let my starter die off. New Year new starter and my first sourdough bake of the year. The santed wife wants to try and go all organic as possible and make two nights a week Vegetarian, not vegan, but lacto ovo so pasta and cheese are still on the table.

This is a variation of Chad Robinsons Sourdough but with 10% Dark Rye Stone Ground Organic Flour, 12 hour rise.

Black Olive Fougasse:

Following Chad Robertson's recipe, in Tartine, I made a fantastic walnut bread last night.  It is super delicious plain this morning. Not sure if I would make sandwiches on it or not but I suppose I will find out soon.  I used 200 grams of white whole wheat and 800 grams of all purpose.  I burned a bunch of the walnuts (or at least I think they were too dark) so these loaves don't have the full 3 cups but as you can see there are plenty of nuts in the crumb.

Since I've been building up some new starters this past week I had some active discard to hand so decided to whip up some kind of wholewheat tinned loaf for some nice toast in the mornings.

Came out pretty well, nice texture and gentle malty flavour from the extract together with the rye starter depth.

White Wheat Flour 350g,  Wholewheat Flour 100g, Salt 7g,  Water 270g, Rye Starter 100g, 1 tspn malt extract

Mixed, rested 1hr, (S+F, rest 30min) x 4, shaped and tinned, proofed 2hrs and baked

Crumb

Pinhead oatmeal fermented for 48 hours with a rye starter before incorporating into the dough. Finished in oatbran.

As some of you know, I was chosen to work with Sharon Burns-Leader, Jeffery Hamelman, and a few other wonderful bakers from the East Coast all of tremendous talent and charm. So much was done in such little time, and yet still so much more research is being done on growing heritage grain varieties to bring them back to market. I know that my time spent at Wide Awake Bakery this past weekend was one of the most memorable moments of my career to date.

Oh, yes, I was nervous. Yes, I didn't feel like I was deserving of being there. And yes, we baked some bread.

We have been working our way up the whole multigrain SD ladder for some tike starting at 12% and now this one is 50%.  50% is the minimum whole grain we would like to eat as our daily bread for all kinds of personal health reasons. Plus it tastes so much better than white bread in Lucy’s book as well as mine.

Sending this to Yeastspotting.

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This week among other things baked... together we baked Polenta pepita breads...Helen did not put rosemary in ours... Barb used a recipe that had it and used it.

Helen and I made recipe pretty straight to the script... Barb, creative thinker that she is... added brown sugar candied bacon crumbles, along with the pumpkin seeds and rosemary... she said the rosemary was a little overpowering the first day... but this morning, that rosemary had mellowed and the bacon had taken the stage.

Sounds like a very good for Barb. As you can see it is a great looking bread.