txfarmer's blog

Boy, my oven and I have been busy this holiday.

Firstly, the wreath bread. The dough formula is based on Wild Yeast's cranberry fennel bread here: http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2008/12/27/cranberry-semolina-crown-with-pine-nuts-and-fennel/ ,but I used cranberries and pistachio instead for the festive color.

I jumped ahead in my BBA challenge to make this stollen since I figured it makes a lot more sense to have it now, rather than ... next Jan. It's yummy, with all that dried fruits, how can it not be?!

This bread has two sources of inspiration. First is the basic sourdough formula from BBA, which is this week's recipe for the BBA challenge (yes, we are still hanging on, the end is near though); the other is the mexcali heat bread from the ever so helpful sourdough home website:http://www.sourdoughhome.com/chipotlebeanbread.html

This one is from "Local Breads", a book I have love/hate relationship with. All 4 recipes I've tried so far from this book have turned out beautifully, however, with so many errors, I have to do extensive research online before trusting a recipe from there, such a shame, I would've loved to bake more from it. This one is super delicious, how can it not be, since bacon makes everything better, not to mention the already delicous baguette!

Another winner from Dan Lepard's book "The handmade loaf".

The dough was very sticky and wet from soaked oats and grated apples (I used Fuji), but I like wet dough. I used Sir Lancelot high gluten flour because I ran out of bread flour at home (17 different kinds of flour, yet that's the one I ran out), the end result was a beautiful bread with open, moist, and chewy crumb. Intentionally left a few bigger chunks of apple in the dough, which made the apple taste stronger.

The picture above shows the 5th Horst Bandel Pumpernickel I made, and the last 4 were made within the span of a month, yes, I am just a tad "obsessive". :P