Here I am, listening to this today, enjoying a strangely warm December afternoon while counting the days/hours until we head home (I'm somewhere near Boucherville) and going through my increasingly short Christmas bake list.
This is the third time I followed Benito's version of Eric's favorite deli rye sourdough. After the first two times, my biggest frustration was my inability to get the rye sour well incorporated with the bread flour after its initial development........enter my new toy. My lovely wife got me an Ankarsrum mixer for Christmas, and even green-lighted me using it a bit early.
My two favorite kitchen appliances:
Nurnberger rye from Chicago Specialty Bakers:
Latvian rye from Racine Bakery: 
Two rye mashes for upcoming Russian bread bakes. Both done together in the sous-vide bath.
First is a mash for Riga bread with homemade rye malt and T997 light rye; 2.5hrs at 66C:
Second made with Russian solod and home ground rye with the course bran sifted off; 5 hrs at 66C:
I just LOVE this technique of gluten development in two parts!! It is amazingly successful and completely eliminates all hands on except shaping .
As an aside I do not shape my loaves . I dump out the dough cut it in half and pick up the long piece and drop it into my Batard shaped cloth lined banneton. That’s it. The boule gets all four sides folded in and plopped down folded side down in the cloth lined banneton. No tightening no fuss no muss.
and still kinda get away with it? Answer - a lot.
Background is rooted, but barely, in my recent enjoyment of an 80% PFF biga version. I was refreshing the regularly neglected 75% mixed flour levain along with the workhorse 100% AP levain when I suddenly had this "brilliant" idea. Why not change a few things at once so that I won't know what may have worked and what didn't?
Things that changed, some not necessarily on purpose:
Just wanted to drop a note about how much I enjoyed both making and eating this bread.
This is a quality recipe. Great posts from David and Hans and lots of techniques and tricks in the comments to their posts meant this was like following a well charted path.
This bread surprised me by it's mildness. Was a pleasure to eat. Even the kids got stuck into it!
I was having fun with Borodinsky so I ploughed ahead with a black rye (not bad) and a Franconia and Auvergne from ryebaker.com. I'm pretty bummed by the results, particularly as I spent a lot of time sprouting, drying, milling rye and spelt flour.
I made a few steps that caused me problems:
Benny started an interesting experiment that was right up my alley. He wanted to know the affect that sugar had on a SD starter. I am always looking to enhance the yeast in my starter. So here I go…
Images above and below show calibration before any readings were taken.
