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This is the best song ever, The Bread Song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFuhWnHtWWQ

Thomas

Does anyone know of a good recipe for this bread? Sciachatta?  not quite sure of the spelling pronounced (sky-cha-ta).  Thanks!

Yesterday I baked two sourdough boules; it's become a weekly chore. Sourdough has all but replaced our pre-starter days' bread machine whole wheat or white sandwich loaf dough. Two loaves, with a baguette or two, and occasionally Jewish Rye keeps the two of us well stocked for a week to ten days.

Nice looking loaves, yes?

And now, another point of view.

I made up another batch of dmsnyder's San Joaquin Sourdough and this is my bake. They are still singing as I type this! I got a better ear this time- I think it was a better scoring, I cut a little deeper than the last try. Also, I used the full 21 hour cold fermentation for this bake as apposed to the 14 hours on the last attempt. I don't know if this has anything to do with the better ear or not.

My question though is (I guess directed at David, but others please chime in): 

Doing some baking experiments with portugese sweet bread from "Advanced Bread and Pastry" book. This bake, I could of waited an additional hour or so but was pressed for time. The dough can triple+ in size during it's final proof. I filled these bread with ghiridelli chocolate chips and walnuts. Next bake, I will proof more and add more chocolate! The topping is some pearl sugar.

I

I called this horse bread  due to the fact that a number of the ingrediants are easily obtained from stockfeed stores catering for the horse people. There was some discussion on the availability or lack of Molasses in another topic on TFL. For this bread i got my daughter to pick up 2 litres of molasses from the rural store when she was picking up her bales of hay for the nags.

The first one is Alsace loaf with Rye from Dan Lepard's book "A handmade loaf". Recipe can be found online here: http://blog.rezkonv.de/2007/08/31/alsace-loaf-with-rye/ , but of course I have the book and love it.

They just didn't want to be baguettes!

I took the recipe under Metric and divided by 20 to use 500g total flour in the recipe.  I did make some changes... I added an egg white into the water to total 165g in the final dough.  I used 1/2 tsp of yeast in the final dough.  This gave me longer fermentation.  I also hand mixed the dough.

Today I made Hamelman's poolish baguettes.   Which retaught me a lesson I've already learned which is that making baguettes is hard.   A month or two ago, I tried the Bouabsa formula several times, without having any idea that it wasn't reasonable to start one's baguette making career with that, so I backed off to Hamelman which I think is quite delicious in its own right.   But it is still hard for the novice bread baker.  

From this side it doesn't look so bad -

I have blogged about baking Pretzels before and this time I had one concern I wanted to be able to improve on-shape. Turns out two improvements were made and I will need expert baker's help to determine what is responsible for the slight texture change -which in my eyes made them perfect!