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Continue my weekend baking with rye bread. This weekend's bake was sourdough rye with walnuts and raisins. The bread has 35% rye flour. The recipe came from Hamelman's Bread cookbook.

I followed Hamelman's recipe by including commercial yeast and skip my usual overnight dough retardation. One of the advantages of including commercial yeast is a a shorter fermentation schedule. It only took 3.5 hrs to have the fresh loaves from the mixing.

I went on a shopping trip today here in Sacramento, visiting some bakeries I've never been to before and fetching esoteric flours I can't get at my neighborhood grocery.

Here's what I bought where, and what I thought of it:

1.  A baguette from Freeport Bakery on Freeport Blvd (Tasted like day old bread made with cake flour, weightless squishy stuff, didn't care for it at all!)

2.  A loaf of Deli Rye with caraway seeds from The Bread Store on J Street (A beautiful nearly spherical loaf, chewy and delicious, loved it!)

Ingredient List for TFL Bakers

A previous blog:
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/22562/sourdough-crackers

Brother David and his wife Susan are traveling back to Fresno after a weekend in the Bay Area to see our visiting brother Aaron from Colorado.  So with the two locals, we had 80% of the Snyder siblings in one place.  That place, of course, was well-provisioned with baked goods, and we had a very nice brunch at Sister Norma’s apartment in Oakland. 

I'm pretty satisfied with these- the lamination worked better than last time I tried - I think I was keeping the dough too cold last time around.

A selection of breads made at home this weekend... 

•1.    Borodinsky

Charmeli are one of the only glazed taralli in Italy and are an Easter specialty. This taralli however can be found year round. Made with eggs and boiled before baking they are very light.

http://turosdolci.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/a-frosted-taralli-charmel-are-an-easter-specialty/

My wife returned from Israel with some beautiful zatar. The word describes both an herb as well as an herb blend. She brought both, from a spice dealer in her home town, where her family has been living for about two hundred years. The spice dealer has been there about as long. The blend varies from place to place and typically, people argue over their preferences. Most of the blends have the zatar, thyme, sesame. This one has lemon salt as well. It's just a great herbal condiment.

     Hello, everyone.  I'm Teketeke's son (Akiko), and this is my first time baking bread. I made rosemary bread.  This took me about 2 1/2 hours. Oops, one of my loaves didn't de-gas much. This recipe was from the Food Network.

 It tasted great, I loved it, but I had to add a lot of water though because the dough was tough.