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I made this bread with a white leaven, elaborated to a starter, which was pre-fermented for 12 hours.

The finished dough had 108% pre-ferment starter, 30% wholemeal Spelt flour, 70% white bread flour and 75% hydration.

The flour and water were left to autolyse in the fridge for 12 hours before the starter, salt and a cold soaker of quinoa (I didn't weigh it so I don't know the percentage) were added and mixed.

Polish Cottage Rye

Polish Cottage Rye - Crumb

Multigrain Sourdough

This past weekend I made French Bread I, using instant yeast and overnight retardation, following Reinhart's recipe in Crust and Crumb. I ended up with 3 loaves and baked them in our mud oven (traditional for Cyprus). I kneaded the dough as described in the book to disperse the ingredients, form the gluten and hydate/ferment. I should admit, when I performed the windowpane test, I had difficulty forming it. So, I continued kneading an extra 5 - 8 minutes...

I've attempted a cinnamon swirl bread with a little less than 1/2 the amount of yeast called for in the recipe here: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/blog/bnb.

So, I thought I'd push the limit a little more. The hokkaido milky loaf was a recipe I was very interested in. The entire recipe calls for almost 2 pounds of ingredients with the flour contributed more 50% of the weight. I reduced the yeast to a scant 1/3 of the amount called for in the recipe, so probably around 2.5 to 3 oz

 Panne Siciliano

Panne Siciliano - crumb

I found the flavour and texture to be better the next day (and not in the 2 hours after baking), and there was a little sourness. Is the durum flour meant to be sour? (My "sourdough" is not really sour and it's not previously imparted any sourness to breads).

This was something of an unusual weekend in bread-baking for me in that I made two recipes that were fairly experimental.  I just posted my experience with this week's sandwich bread, a 100% sprouted wheat bread.  My dinner bread this week was the German Sourdough Rye recipe from Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book.  I had not originally planned to make this, but got both whole wheat and rye sourdough starters going this past week and just couldn't resist trying one out.  I was leaning toward this recipe for my first attempt, and

Almost every weekend, I make one loaf of what I think of as "sandwich bread".  As you might expect from this nomenclature, this is the loaf that I'll be using for sandwiches in the coming week.  I generally pick recipes that are reliable, fairly plain, and light enough to make a good sandwich (admittedly, I like dense breads, so I might be less strict about this last criterion than many of you).  My more experimental recipes, or those including fruit or nuts or lots of herbs or other goodies, or those that are just extremely dense, fall under what I think of as my "dinner bre