joc1954's blog

 I used recipe for Challah from Hamelman's book "Bread" for preparing the dough. The only difference was that I used milk instead of water. The dough is on stiiff side so it is relatively easy to work with it.

Another version of decorative bread scoring with zebra pattern, this time on a 100% semola rimacinata loaf with 70% hydration and 15% inoculation, cold retarded for about 10 hours only.

My oldest grandson is a big fan of "Pane di Altamura", so I like to bake the bread from semola rimacinata to make him happy. Actually I got only semola flour so I used my home mill to re-mill it twice and get rimacinata flour.

This bread was inspired by some post on Facebook some time ago. Since the "Eclipse Challenge" I never used the charcoal colour in the bread and therefore I thought that it's time to practice a bit with decorative scoring.

For a long time I was striving to achieve similar result to what dabrownman has done in this post.

Inspired by Mini Oven comment to my Eclipse 2017 challenge bread #2 I decided to try the idea of stuffing the vegetables with the sourdough. All the bell peppers and egg plan are from our home garden.

This bread was inspired by a nmygarden comment (Thanks Cathy for your comment!!!!) to my Elderberry and Hokkaido squash bread.

I wanted to be a little bit more innovative with this bread. I knew I need to make a black dough which was kind of a mental reservation for me, but then I accepted this idea and got 20 g of black color made from charcoal.

This bread is really a little bit unusual. I used sourdough colored with charcoal to simulate obscuration and Hokkaido squash to simulate the sun's corona.

The dough during the bake expanded much more than anticipated due to intensive fermentation in the bottom part which was warming up slowly due to the squash collar. I created an opening in the bottom of squash to get more even heat transfer and also to get another "solar eclipse" from the bottom side of the loaf.

I think I don't need to explain more as pictures are self explanatory.

First two movies:

After a long time I decide to experiment with tastes and colors. Right now the elderberry in our vicinity is getting mature and there is abundance of Hokkaido squashes on our home garden. I also decided to coat the bread and dust it with extra flour before scoring it to get some extra effects.

Inspired by recent ricman post about first try making croissants I decided to try my luck. Actually I have never made before a laminated dough as all recipes that I have checked looked very complicated and required a lot of time. 

Croissants while being baked.

While staying at Island of Hvar in middle Dalmatia I got inspired by big fields of lavender to give a try to a lavender bread. Right now there is a crop of lavender going on and when you pass such field the smell of lavender is simply amazing. Island of Hvar is known to be the island with most sunny days in whole Dalmatia what provides a very good natural conditions for growing lavender, wine and olive trees.