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Until recently I was busy working hard making English Sparkling wine for a large UK producer, we collectively processed 2000 tonnes of grapes! Now harvest is over it's time to get baking again and of course it is panettone season...

In addition to making wine at scale I have a few vines and make my own. I do spontaneous fermentation and I used this as a source of naturally occurring yeasts.

It's been several weeks since then and I have made three panettones (one per week) with my new LM starter.

Also I have been using a new formula - my own!

I asked the husband for a bread challenge yesterday and he said why not make an airy and not dense free-form 100% ancient grain loaf?

I thought I might as well take the opportunity to conduct some experiments regarding hydration levels of levains, pH levels and resulting crumb/taste. Since I didn't have enough emmer left, I went with einkorn. (Forgot I had an unopened bag of Khorasan in the cabinet - damn! Next time.)

I began last night by making three different levains.

I've mentioned before that for the past few months I've been working on an upgraded version of this site. It is getting close to ready. Ready enough that if anyone wants to see it, you can.

The preview version of the new site lives at: https://refresh.thefreshloaf.com/

Taking inspration from some very nice looking Semola/Durum loaves recently posted on the forum, I thought it was time to try my hand.

I haven't baked with semola rimacinata for a while; I think the last time was based on Maurizio's excellent Pane Siciliano recipe.

This time it was to be an homage to pane di Altamura with 100% semola rimacinata including the levain. I already had a bag of this flour:

I mentioned in my cake post that I was making purple sweet potato sourdough milk rolls, here they are.  Utilizing a stiff sweet levain to reduce the sour tang once again and adding a tangzhong to ensure fluffiness and to delay staling.  These turned out really well.  I love the colour of the soft shreddable crumb along with the small blisters on the crust.  For convenience I did a cold retard at the end of bulk so I could start these the day before our dinner party and then bake them the day of.

We are hosting some of our friends for dinner tonight.  In addition to the purple sweet potato SD milk rolls I have fermenting, I made this gingerbread layer cake with cream cheese frosting.  This recipe is care of Bake From Scratch.  The cake recipe that follows is for one 8” round cake, so I doubled it for this layer cake.  The frosting recipe would be more than enough for a three layer cake, so I halved it for this two layer cake.

My first fruitcake was a Bara Brith, this is a fruitcake that Southern Living says is for those who don’t like fruitcake.  I like the variety of fruit that it has in it along with the nuts.  The recipe calls for apricots, dates, raisins, tart dried cherries, candied cherries, cranberries, apples, candied peel, slivered almonds and pecans.  I used extra apricots and cranberries and didn’t use dates or apples.  

I first had these spinach pies (or pita, as it's called there) when hiking near Ljuboten a couple of years back. A very old lady invited us to her hut for a pita made with nettles and cheese. That was the best pie I've ever eaten. Since then, I've tried to replicate it at home with spinach (no success with Belgian nettles - tasted very grassy).

The pie uses a dough that is just a little thicker than phyllo. 

Dough for one pie

My starter was fed only once after returning from our trip to Florida when I made the levain for this bread.  As a result the fermentation was much slower than usual.  However, this bread baked up just fine.  This dough was enriched with the addition of some wildflower honey and toasted sesame oil.  I added both black and golden toasted sesame seeds, thus the triple sesame seeds.  This has 20% sprouted whole Spelt which adds a great flavour and extensibility to the dough.

Panettone season is starting up again --- exciting, huh? I know some people bake it year-round, but I think my last one this year was last January and one colomba in the spring. It's a multi-day project, so for me, I need to be able to shoehorn it into my schedule and this year it didn't happen. But this week that finally changed and I tried something new that worked so well I thought I should share.