Hello from the Mid-Atlantic

I've been baking bread at home for... what? maybe 20 years now? My personal conception of perfection has always been the ideal baguette de tradition with its amazing flavor and aroma, its beautiful grignes and golden brown oreilles, and the crackling wonderment of its crust. But I do bake a fairly wide variety of things, and our youngest has just given his old man a copy of Ginsberg's The Rye Baker for Father's Day, so I'll be proceeding beyond my previous American-style deli ryes to all manner of new projects from near and far.

I like the biology, chemistry, and physics of bread baking, and I've been taking careful notes on nearly every bake for the past 4+ years. This practice is just as useful as it's reputed to be in helping you learn and improve your skills. All those notes go into my logbooks, which are of course known as bûches (bad pun, but I like it).

Anyway, it was going through The Rye Baker that nudged me into finally signing up here. It's great to see that there are separate threads in the forum for so many of the individual recipes. Don't know what rock I've been living under.