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The shorter daylights and colder temperatures have been affecting my bread baking. It has slowed down fermentation resulting in me misjudging the time required to fully proof the bread. Not to mention that it is already dark by the time I am done baking making it harder to take a nice picture of the loaf.

Anyway, back to something simple and comforting for this week - a 50% wholewheat sourdough. A nice hearty loaf with stronger flavours contributed by the wholewheat flour and the levain used. 

Great bread! We loved it, I'll have to make it one more time to get the moisture content right as the crumb in my version came out a spongy. But I'm amazed to get this much rise in such a high whole grain bread. The interesting thing about this bread is that it uses both a bread starter and also yeast at the final stage. The dough rose on schedule!

I didn't have the Spelt 1150 flour so I used a mix of pure spelt flour with bread flour. I guessed from what I read on the web.

The dough was very wet and soggy, I bowl mixed and later kneaded with a hand paddle.

We often cut it into bread sticks with a pizza cutter, this one had an excellent texture and flavor. Crisp, crunchy crust, chewy on the inside and gooey on the top, almost like a sauce-less pizza!

Well it's technically over.  My experiment has concluded.  Yesterday was the last of the farmer's markets and I made it to 21 of 26 of the markets with bread to trade.  I've made some friends and had a really good time trading food for food.  In honor I offered my loaves as gifts yesterday in appreciation of the farmers who were happy and willing to trade with me.  This didn't go so well as they still pushed food at me.  But i tried. Furthermore they have added a winter market to start next week so I guess it never ends.  Yay.

that baker's have to EAT their mistakes... I am okay with this one.  I used a chewy roll recipe.. attempting to get those big holes I envy... but "Lucille Ball" was in the kitchen!!!

  This looked promising... but the jiggliness was 

a scary factor... I knew it would either flatten or stick... welllllll..... 

It chose to stick... totally....but the real    

During the heat of my Thanksgiving rush in the bakery right now (so many rolls...so many rolls), I received word from a wonderful lady I was interviewed by back in May, named June. She works with New York State in Agriculture and specifically was interviewing about my heavy usage (roughly 90%) of local whole grains. 

Another nice Forkish style loaf, 300 g flour, 10% durham semolina, 231 g water 1 tsp coarse sea salt and 3/4 Tbs EVOO. I once again worked at tight seams during the fold of the pre-shape and shape and it looks like a pretty tight bloom on this bake. Again this loaf was risen with 25g sweet levain and 25g yeast water levain.

The other day CeciC posted some fantastic looking crackers made without any leavening at all here

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/35589/whey-seeds-crackers

As soon as I saw them I new Lucy and I would have to give them a go since we have wanted to make crackers for just about forever.

The last bread we are making for Thanksgiving is Mini’s Rye Bread at 100% hydration sans Chia seeds but adding a Munich Dopplebock, some soaker water, flax seed and yeast water to the mix and deleting the gargantuan pine nuts she found in Chili.  Her bake is found here:

Mini's 100% Dark Rye & Chia Recipe ...Love at 104% hydration

I tried something different with this one in that I used a starter that I fed with rye flour.  It really took off and improved the "lift" for my starter.  I had used all AP flour previously and was not getting much rise lately. It's getting colder as well, so that doesn't help.  The dough was a bit wetter than usual, and the shaping was much more difficult than I anticipated. I had to knead in a bit more flour, but finally got it to where I wanted it.