I have always been fascinated by artisan breads, i wanted to explore the world of hand crafted breads knowing every single detaile of this art .So suddenly at age 30, i decided to educate my self by diging websites and searching through cookbooks and wishing to end with courses.
Normally i bake on weekends either for my home or familly gatherings. And the following photos shows my first attempt with pesto bread made from the (Italian Baker) by Carol Field.

Rised dough......ready to go to the oven.

Fresh baked bread.

Sliced pesto bread.

Crust & Crumb.

Notes: 1-The bread smells pesto but does not taste as pesto.
2-There was no crust at the bottom of the bread (Hmmmm.....) may be the baking stone was not too hot.
3- The bread was a little bit heavy....could it be the oil of the pesto. :-?

My first attempt at creating a sourdough starter. I used the raisin water technique because I wasn't sure I wanted some of the other things that could be found floating in the air around here. This is approx 48 hours after I started it. It now sits safely in my refrigerator until I get past the spring allergy season LOL

Well, I was going to tell more about it last night, but my husband distracted me. As Paul Harvey would say, "Now for the rest of the story."

I started my starter using what I had here based on Floyd's Featured Story ""When Yeast Attacks"

I had a box of california raisins from Wal-Mart and I used stone ground whole wheat flour (this was ground by a friend about 6 weeks ago). I started with the 3/4 cup of raisin water and 1 cup of ww flour. When I checked it about 10 hours later, it looked to me like there was a little bit of bubbling going on. So I added a cup of water and a cup of ww flour. Waited another 8 - 12 hours with it sitting in my cupboard with just a paper towel placed very loosely over it. It didn't look very promising when I checked it this time, but I figured I didn't have much invested in it and a couple more cups of flour wasn't going to break the bank, so I put a cup of wal-mart brand, all-purpose flour and a cup of water in, stirred it all up and left it to grow. I came back Wednesday morning to a very happy starter. I wasn't sure what direction I was going to go at that point, so I fed it (all growing babies need to be fed, right?) and let it sit until I took the pictures last night.

I probably won't be able to do any baking until Monday with it being Mother's Day weekend, but that gives me more time to search for "the" recipe that is going to knock my husband's socks off. He isn't thrilled with the SD bread that comes from the store, and I have to keep reminding him that my homemade from scratch food 99.999 percent of the time tastes much better than anything we buy at the store or from a restaurant :lol: I just know he's going to love this bread and I won't be able to buy loaf bread off the shelf anymore.

More to come next time on the Cookie Bakes Bread channel.

While coming home from a computer conference last week I managed to hit a couple of artisan bakeries.

The best one I stopped at was Wild Flour Bakery in Freestone, California (halfway between Sebastopol and Bodega in west Sonoma County... "the wine country"... find it on my bakery finder).

As the sign out front says, everything there is organic and they bake in a brick oven. Note the reflection of a grain silo in the front window. It is hard to tell in these photos, but the bakery is out in the country in the middle of a beautiful valley.

Unfortunately, I got there right about the same time that a bus load of people doing the winery tours stopped there and I had a car full of family, so I did not get a chance to talk to the bakers or get many good pictures of the place. I did pick up a loaf of their Fougasse, a picnic bread containing olives, onions, and blue, jack, and chedder cheeses. The loaf was still warm, and it was a great thing to munch while driving out to the coast.

They have wonderful looking scones and sticky buns too.

I took a quick snap of their menu (large image so it is easy to read).