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The various Rosellas in our garden loves eating the lavender seeds, sometimes daintily holding it with their feet while eating. It served as my inspiration for bread this week. Lavender makes me think of France, so voila, Lavender Fougasse! 

The lavender flavour is very strong, so I used only a sprinkle and combined it with rosemary and orange thyme. I used my wheat sourdough starter for this one.

This week I decided to wing it somewhat, a departure for me. I made a dough I’ve made often before - 30% whole wheat, 79% hydration, 12% levain - and added a soaker of a small handful each of sesame, flax, chia, pumpkin, and sunflower seeds. I didn’t weigh the seeds or water in the soaker because I knew it would be a much higher percentage of the dough weight than much I was taught to use. My bad! I’ll have to experiment to recreate it to get the wonderful aroma and flavor. The dry seeds were probably around 30% or more of the dough weight.

I've been wanting to try baking these for quite some time now and finally managed to do it.  Unlike NY style bagels these are not boiled, but rather baked and dipped in a sweet pomegranate molasses and sesame seed mixture which gives these bagels a very unique flavor.  I converted a recipe using instant yeast to sourdough I found in The Palestinian Table by Reem Kassis. My mother starter is kept at 66% hydration so if yours is different you can adjust accordingly.

This loaf was partly inspired by the tempering technique in Indian cooking. The aroma of spices blooming in hot oil is notably different from that of dry toasting spices. This makes sense: we all know the flavor of spices is oil-soluble :)

Spiced Walnuts SD with 50% Sprouted White Wheat & Rye

Dough flour (all freshly milled):

It was time to clean out a few items from the pantry and the fridge. I found two kinds of feta, three kinds of olives, sun-dried tomatoes and roasted peppers, both in oil. So this recipe was created with the help of Cathy’s (nmygarden) recipe from last March. http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/55587/happy-baker

This was a repeat of this lovely bread, attempting to get more height and less spread.  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/58551/oaty-sourdough.  I also wanted to see if there was a difference between my two starters.

I had some left over milled grain flour sitting in the fridge.   Need a brown bread!

So I started off weighing flour to see what sized loaf, the plan was for 600 g 1:2:3
9 gm kamut
45 g spelt
93 g whole wheat
30 g rye

I found with my last bake, that by coating the dough with melted butter, then the chocolate filling, that as the dough rose in the proof and baking stages, it squeezed most of the chocolate to the top of the loaf.

With version II, I omitted the melted butter and think it bonded better to the dough and this version has more veins of chocolate than the first bake. I also used a little more than half a batch of pulla dough and found 525 grams properly filled the loaf pan. Pulla is a dough enriched with milk, sugar, eggs and cardamom.

This one is similar to the ones we have made of late for the lovely wife except it wasn’t made in a pan.  Other differences were that the levain was made with home milled whole; rye, red and white what and oat groats as a single stage and the levain was retarded for 24 hours after it doubled.

I baked a half batch of bagels this morning following Peter Reinhart's recipe fro "Artisan Breads Every Day." Boy did they ever turn out good! I should have made a full batch. It was my first time attempting bagels and this recipe will definitely be a regular in my baking rotation.

I enjoyed my first home baked bagel for a late breakfast with cream cheese. Now I need to go out and find some lox!

Happy baking! Ski