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An accumulation of small amounts of various leftover grains motivated this bake, a cracked grain sourdough bread. I had some rye berries, hard red wheat, spelt, barley and whole oats, 175 g total - coarse cracked and then soaked in 70 g hot water for two hours. The bread was made with 200g fresh milled whole wheat, sifted flour, 800g all purpose flour, 20g sea salt, 220g starter and 750g water.

I still have some Lap Cheong (Chinese sausage) left over from my Lap Cheong filled buns so wanted to use some up. I’ve been wondering what to top a focaccia with to go along with the lap cheong when I saw a post by King Arthur of a Taiwanese Focaccia, so I borrowed some of their ideas and added a couple of slight changes of my own. For one I had a bit of semola rimacinata left that I wanted to use up so all the flour in this focaccia is that finely ground semolina.

No time for experimenting and recipe writing.  No time for weighing the ingredients and keeping track of time! This is purely grandma style rye made in one day 

Morning

2 cups rye flour,  1 cup warm water,  4 tablespoons rye starter,  mix into a paste,  let ferment in a lukewarm spot 

Late afternoon 

 I first posted a formula for a naturally leavened  pugliese bread 11 years ago. I fiddled with the formula and procedure a bit over several years, but I haven’t made this bread in about 6 years. Today’s version is different from some of the ones I have made before in a couple respects: First, I use an all-white flour biga rather than a mixed grain liquid levain. And, second, I hand mixed rather than using a stand mixer. 

300g BF

200g Water

30 g leaven

6g salt

2 hr Bulk Fermentation;Overnight retard ref; 30min shaping and rest; 2hr proofing; 240C dutch oven 20min, 25 mi

It was an experimental kind of weekend.  Two loaves that I've been wanting to try and had a window of opportunity.  Really happy with one and mixed results with the other.

Despite the fact that growing up challah was my favourite bread, since I’ve been baking bread for the past three years I’ve only made challah once. My first challah was Maggie Glezer’s sourdough challah which I blogged about last year. I made some changes to her recipe in order to add some whole grain. I also love an eggy challah so also increased the egg. I reduced both the water and the oil to compensate for the contribution of both by the additional egg. This is what I came up with for my test bake.

May 12, 2022.  5" pizza.

My take on Adam Ragusea's cast iron pan pizza from his video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYxB4QBlrx4

Dough, enough for 4 pizza crusts, 5" mini-personal size, cooked in a 6.5" Lodge cast iron skillet.  Dough is divided into 4 portions of about 50 grams each.

This is Benny's 100% WW Sourdough Hokkaido Milk Bread. (The link points to his 2.0 version and I'm not positive whether I made that one or another variant.) Anyway, I attempted this bread back in January but got no rise to speak of, undoubtedly because I did not a thing to prepare my rye sour for a sweet levain and enriched dough. I baked it anyway and while it rose a couple inches in the oven, it barely filled half the pan.

Time to try to make a raisin bread...and might as well go to the Whole Grain version....and might as well do sprouted grain as well. To that end I took the recipe from the book and tweaked it a bit and this is the result. 

RECIPE AND CALCULATIONS HERE