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OK you guys, I'm kinda excited  - everyone knows the baker around here is Floyd, and with him doing all the breads, I haven't had to venture into the kitchen to deal with my mageirocophobia. I don't know what it is about baking but I have always tended to shy away from anything baked beyond the occasional cookie and cake.

For all that I'm on here every day for the last 6+ years, I still had never actually baked any sort of yeasted bread myself - I've only made simple quickbreads  -  one anyway: banana bread.

Update to my earlier blog: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/23735/did-i-hit-jackpot

Even Pizza tournes out great:

Happy baking!

Thomas

Generally, I don’t make fruit breads often. Not that I don’t like them. I just have the tendency to bake more seeds and grains breads. I have two big bags of golden raisins and dried cranberry (about 1.5 kg each) from CostCo sitting and taking room in the pantry that I so wanted to use them up. Hence, there have been and will be more fruit bread baking in the coming months.

While doing a little R&R around the house 'to say the least'!  I wanted something healthy, handy and easy for dinner...this is what I found in the frig.  Hmmm, a meaty ham bone in the freezer along with some black eyed peas, in the veg. bin, lot's of carrot's, 7lbs. and a large container of fresh spinach, all organic veggies,  fresh blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, baby romain's, yumm, some home made candied walnuts.  Fresh berry, gorgonzola salad dressing.

Potato Yeast Water Pullman Loaf

Long before I had every heard the name 'Yeast Water', I actually had made a culture and had maintained it for months. In fact, I used a 1/4 tsp of the Potato Yeast Water (PYW) to jump-start my first Apple Yeast Water (AYW) culture. Link:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/20693/culturing-growing-and-baking-range-wild-yeasts#comment-143857

We just returned from 2 weeks in Europe, the first 10 days in Italy, traveling with one of my sisters and her husband. We then spent 4 days in Paris and one in Brussels.

...you return from a wonderful weeklong boat trip on the Rhine river, through Germany and France, with only one souvenir: a Kugelhopf baking pan.

Today, I baked my first ever Kugelhopf. The original recipe came from here http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/19577/gugelhupf. I modified it slightly.

Kugelhopf  (recipe from TFL; Hezi, IsrealiBaker :modified)

Ingredients:

The question I had is what would happen if you fed a Blueberry Yeast Water/Bread Flour levain additional Blueberry Yeast water, using seeds from previous levain builds.  Namely, what is the effect of increasing population of blueberry yeast over a series of builds while holding the overall volume constant.  Would there be an improvement or degradation in rise times or volumes?  Would there emerge a limit as to how quickly a doubling or peaking would occur?  Would it explode into a new black hole? These were the questions that I just had to answer for myself.

I don't know why I've waited so long to make this bread, after buying hamelman's book. I've done it before, from intructions giving on this blog, which were very helpful, btw. For grains, I used a mix of fennel seeds, flaxseeds, spelt berries and oat bran. I retarded the dough overnight, omitted the yeast as instructed, and I baked it directly from the fridge. For the final fermentation, the instructions weren't very clear to me... in case I opted for retarding the dough overnight, it still gets an hour of fermentation on room temperature, or after shaping goes directly in the fridge??

I’ve been experimenting with various types of yeast water for several weeks now.  I now have five separate jars percolating on the counter or in the refrigerator.  Since I’ve discovered that very little if any fruit flavor is discernable in baked breads made from these waters, it makes sense to me to keep only one.  It also makes sense to me to keep the one that is the most effective.  I have heard that raisin yeast water is the strongest and most active.  When I first started experimenting with these waters, I made a raisin/apricot yeast water, but the color and mu