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Peter Reinhart calls for malt powder in several recipes in Crust and Crumb so I ordered some diastatic malt from Amazon.  Yesterday was the first time I've tried it.  The stuff tastes quite sweet.  I threw together some dough, doubling up on the yeast and malt percentages Reinhart might call for just for jollies.  The stuff rose higher and faster than anything I can recall!!!  It was surprising, almost spooky!

My wife and I are beginning to learn the techniques involved in baking bread. So many new terms to learn, so many steps to master. We appreciate this forum as the readers here have already helped us tremendously.

Our question now is the difference between starter and preferment. We were advised to use a preferment to create more flavor and possibly larger holes in our foccacia loaves. While reading about preferments we came across the term "starter" which we had heard before. We thought starter was only used in sourdough bread.

I tried making my first loaf of bread that wasn't entirely made from white flour. 

As much as I love white bread, I'm eating it all the time so I felt the need for something that was a bit better for me.

I just used what I already know for making white bread and added some rye flour and wholemeal flours, then mixed in some mixed seeds. 

I'd say the percentages of flour were roughly;

60% Strong White

30% Rye

10% Wholemeal

1 egg

Another weekend baking with 20% rye bread. This time I made the bread using white starter. I still continued retarding the shaped loaved overnight. I was aiming to reduce the sour flavour in the bread I made last weekend (same 20% rye and retardation, but with rye sourdough starter).

Last night, sometime past midnight, I got a craving for sourdough rye bread.  I had dark rye flour and some starter I made from the same flour a couple weeks back, the first time I made my own starter instead of using commercial stuff from sourdo.com.

Also, I was looking for something to do with the bag of semolina I got at the bulk foods section of the local Winco Foods market, the same place I got the rye flour.  Found a post on TFL about a sandwich loaf made with semolina that got huge oven spring and decided to throw some in the mix.

My wife and I recently aquirred an interest in baking Foccacia. We have made some screamin' loaves but when we compare them to a certain loaf we purchase at Trader Joe's.... we are lacking. Trader Joe's loaf is filled with large holes. That is a characteristic we love but we are not able to reproduce the holes. The recipe we use for the dough is 3 cups of bread flour, combo of .75 cup water and .25 cup of white wine at 120 degrees poured over 2.25 teaspoons of active dry yeast, to the liquid we add.....one T of olive oil.....one T of honey....and a teaspoon of Kosher salt.

Artos - Greek Saints' Day Bread from Kassos

Artos - Greek Saints' Day Bread from Kassos crumb

“Artos” is the ancient Greek word for leavened bread. (“Psomi” is the modern Greek word.) However, “Artos” has come to refer more specifically to various enriched celebration breads, particularly those baked for Easter.

But, first, the weather.  Thunder, lightening and hail may not be a big deal to people in  some localities.  But in Northern California, they are rare as reliable weather-forecasting.  Saturday, our morning coffee was interrupted by a crashing downpour of (admittedly small) hail.  It went on for many minutes and accented our garden with glistening ice.