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Two months ago I bought a new oven so I had to learn how it works, I mean what is the best setup for sourdough heart baking. This led me to change my setup: no more covered baking!

Have you ever seen the incredible oven spring, great crust color, beautiful ears you have with a professional steam injected deck oven? Just take a look at these photos from Wally's excellent post "My Excellent Adventures at King Arthur Flour".

I've been baking the San Francisco Sourdough from Michel Suas' Advanced Bread and Pastry frequently over the past few months. It's very good. This weekend, I decided to try a couple of his other sourdough breads.

I have some experience baking Jewish Sour Ryes and German-type rye breads. Suas' formula for “Sourdough Rye Bread” (Advanced Bread and Pastry, pp. 212-213) seems to me to be for a French-style “Pain de Seigle,” although Suas does not label it as such. It uses a stiff levain identical to the one Suas uses for his “San Francisco Sourdough,” but then the final dough is 60% rye flour. Overall, the rye content is 52% of the total flour. The overall dough hydration is 70%.

this is the Italian bread from Bread Bakers Apprentice, made with my Uncle's home grown olive oil.  These loaves were too long for my peel and I had a devil of a time getting them in the oven.  I had to cook them diagonally one at a time.  The 2nd one was dusted with flour before scoring because the first one almost completely deflated when scoring.  This dough was very hard to move around;  it may have over proofed but I had to run some errands.  I try to schedule bread in between all my other activities but sometimes it just doesn't work.  

We have had this ravioli plate for decades. My mother-in-law had it and when she and my father-in-law passed we inherited it. We have never used it. I often thought about tossing it but never did. The other day David mentioned ravioli on my pasta post. Well that started the wheels turning...no pun intended :) My DH made his usual pasta dough and then I looked up a few YouTube videos on ravioli and we were off. Three dozen later I can honestly say this is VERY easy. I took photos to show step by step.

I was in Walmart last week and noticed a new green bag on the shelf next to the bright yellow Bread Flour from Gold Medal. It could be that this isn't a new offering from GM but it's the first time I have seen the Green package. I thought I would try a bag and see how it like it compared to other AP flours I use. First, the price made me take a second look. It was priced at $4.74 for a 5 pound bag. The Bread flour next to it is $2.65.

I have just returned from a gold prospecting trip here in Western Australia, the trip was organized by my good mate Bob,and it was to be a 2 week away jaunt.

There were two vehicles and a trailer and 4 guys along with my SOUR DOUGH culture setting off from Perth on a saturday morning, we had some rain overnight but the spirits weren't dampend as we picked up the two hire detectors (minelab 4500's).

Hi Again!

Very quickly following on from my last post "Whitsuntide Breads and Other Antics", this is a quick post listing the books that I recommend for my bakery students to source to aid their programme of study.

I am new to baking bread.  I made a loaf of 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread and Whole Wheat Mash Bread from Peter Reinhart's "Whole Grain Breads".  I made both of them in the Batard shape. During the proofing process, both loafs flattened out. The volume did increase as speciefied. It started out about 2.5" to 3" tall and ended up around 1.75".  It did not have any oven bounce.  I used a sheet pan and steam. I do not have a hearth stome yet. What should I do different?