shaving my bread

My newly-developed totally immature habit. Shaving my bread.

Oh OK, from the beginning. I'm thinking about not baking bread anymore, because I'm not good at controlling how much of it I eat when I have a beautiful sourdough loaf in front of me. But I thought another solution would be to bake bread that I'm not crazy about, even if it's pretty good. That would be rye bread. (Apologies to rye lovers - just not part of my culture.) Besides, I had all this rye flour at home, and white whole wheat flour (which I still don't understand). I couldn't bring myself to throw them away, so I thought I'd bake with them and see what happens.

I used these two flours with some bread flour (lost my notes, don't remember proportions - but you wouldn't really want to duplicate this bread anyway), sourdough starter, and a soaker consisting of steel-cut oats and flax seeds. Of course, topped with sesame seeds before baking.

Looks pretty good, eh? The taste is nothing extraordinary, which I expected, and the mouthfeel is not great. But the crust is beautiful.

Here comes the really immature part. I found myself nibbling at the crust, 'cause toasted sesame seeds are always awesome. And I couldn't stop. But I didn't want to eat the bread, 'cause that wasn't as great. So I kept picking at the crust. It was not an efficient method. I took my bread knife and sliced off the crust very thinly all around. Now I had nothing but goodness. The loaf ended up looking like this:

It's completely acceptable if you toast the slices. Plus this way, I don't eat a lot of bread. I think it's a great solution, but I don't know if I can continue to bake bread which I'm not crazy about. We'll see.