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I haven’t baked plain sourdough baguettes in a while and I thought it would be a good way to test out my new flax linen couche.  You might recall that my old couche, sold to me as being flax linen was in fact 100% cotton and has given me tons of grief each time I’ve tried to bake ciabattas.  The dough would stick no matter how much flour I used.  So I broke down and got a new couche.  I seasoned it by sprinkling then rubbing in white flour.  It did work well and my baguette dough didn’t stick, thank goodness.  The big test will be trying ciabatta again.

Hey, bakers!

I know that UFO Bread Lames from Wire Monkey Shop have been talked about for a while, specifically in the online sourdough bread community. Since I've had a UFO lame for seven months and I've been using it actively, I thought I would make a full review of this type of lame. Hope it's helpful for anyone who is considering purchasing one of these, or any other type of lame. Enjoy!

Grant

Because my wife and I just cannot seem to get enough of this fantastic flavor! Shoutout, as usual, to everyones friend Benito for the initial inspiration. This is my 4th time baking this knockout sourdough, and I've tried different formulations each go round. I substituted dark rye for the whole wheat, and used Giusto's La Parisienne for the bread flour along with 50 g KA all purpose for good measure. Also added 15 grams of Giusto's All-Natural Barley Malt, which has been giving me outstanding results.

This is the second time I've made these buns and they really are very tasty. I was so pleased with the first batch that I used exactly the same recipe second time around.

The recipe is courtesy of chef Rick Stein. I watched him make the buns in an episode of his recent Cornwall series. I more or less followed his recipe, but, as always, did a few tweaks:

For Ferment - Day 1

50g - Strong White Flour

25g - Rye Flour

40g - Dark Ale

Day 2

125g - Strong White Flour

25g - Rye Flour

50g - Dark Ale

50g - Warm Water

Day 3

100g - Strong White Flour

100g - Warm Water

5-10g - starter

Pane di Chiavari - from The Italian Baker, my latest from my world tour of bread. Excellent olive taste, soft crust and crumb.

Today I baked Debra Winks 100% Whole-Wheat Sandwich Bread from Hamelman’s Bread Edition 3. I never thought that 100% whole-wheat would produce such a soft and pleasantly tasty sandwich loaf. I milled the whole wheat yesterday, but I’m not sure of the protein level as Debra recommends about 14% protein. Debra also recommended some recent changes to the formula and process tweaks for the home baker that I adopted.