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Many loaves for friends this weekend! My most consuming experiments were with 1) loooooong room temperature autolyse, and 2) pate fermentee as all of the leaven in a loaf. Unfortunately, I don't have crumb pictures for all loaves. The plight of the gifted loaf. 

For this dark chocolate chunk levain, I did a 12-hour autolyse of only flour and water, added levain at 5% of the total weight, carried out a 12-hour room-temperature bulk fermentation, retarded for 12 more hours, shaped and proofed in the refrigerator for another 10 hours:

I tried this recipe yesterday which I found on the popular German site Pötzblog (http://www.ploetzblog.de/2014/08/02/leserwunsch-dunkles-bauernbrot-no-knead/),

essentially a sourdough wheat/rye mix. The author says it is one most of the most read recipes.

I made 2 loaves one in the dutch oven the other one a cloche. I was very pleasantly surprised.

My wife and I ate almost half of a loaf this morning for breakfast.

Tom.

Okay you guys, I've done it! It wasn't even three weeks ago that Sourdough was a foreign idea to me. Thanks to everyone on the site for all kinds of lovely information, finally I'm turning out some happy, happy loaves.

My starter has since turned into three little guys. I feed "Bananas" (he smells like bananas) with whole wheat flour, another one (name to be determined) with rye and whole wheat, and "Pablo Le Mon" (he used to live in a Lemonade pitcher) I feed with whole wheat and white flour.

All is well, they produce nice country sourdough loaves together. 

This is one of my first attempts to bake a decent baguette in my 120 € oven (+stone) with the cheapest flour I could get here in Amsterdam.

This is the formula:

- 1000 g flour
- 750 g water
- 7 g fresh yeast
- 20 g salt

one's got to resort to commercial yeast. This weekend's bake is a chocolate bread with pieces of valrhona bittersweet chocolates mixed into the dough. Oh and with some spelt flour...why not? Bake in a le creuset french oven

And I thought the potato porridge was creamy.  

I got rolled oats from Lonesome Stone Milling (where I get my flour), and soaked them in water for about a day and a half, changing the water once.  After this brief fermentation, the oats started to smell just faintly sweet.  I cooked them at a simmer for about 20 minutes, seasoned with salt to taste, pulled them from the heat, and let them sit from the morning until adding them in after autolyse.  

The formula:

I made Hannah's Confidence Loaf because it looked great and simple.  Started with my rye starter and added the water and br fl.  Of the 400g fl i used 250g br fl, 50g rye, 20g w/w, and 30g cornmeal because it was sitting right there.  I also added 50g mix of chia/flax soaked in some water and a handful of toaster sunflower seeds when i added the salt.  Almost followed the timeline.  Baked in a covered baker for 25m and open for 15m and oven turned off for 5m. The bread came out looking and tasting very good.

I'm back from a week's vacation in the San Diego area with my wife, her brother, and his wife.  We did a lot of the touristy things, including the zoo, the Midway aircraft carrier tour, watching sunsets from the beach, whale watching, Balboa Park, museums, eating some fabulous Mexican food and seafood, horseback rides, and a vineyard tour/tasting.  Each of us came away with our own set of highlights from the trip but one of the best for me was spending a good chunk of this past Wednesday visiting and baking with Stan Ginsberg at his home.

If you haven't tried making a porridge bread yet then what are you waiting for??  There is nothing else like it and if like a nice creamy soft crumb chock full of flavor than  you've come to the right place.

For this version I used some French type flour from KAF, Potato flour, along with some fine Rye flour I had left over from my Rye Book testing.  I added some Durum flour as well since I love the nutty flavor it imparts and for good measure some shaved Asiago and Parmesan cheese.