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Bernard Clayton Jr's The Breads of France, Daniel Leader's Local Breads, and Joe Ortiz' The Village Baker each offer formulas, recipes, and lore on European bread. The authors, all from the USA, published their books between 1978 and 2007 after travels in France, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia (as it was then), and Poland. In recent weeks I've been concentrating on French breads from these books, specifically pain campagne and pain de seigle.

Probably everybody who was reading my recent posts is interested to hear how the bread assessment finished. As this will be a slightly longer post I am revealing now the most important fact: I got the gold award.

So you can stop reading here, you already got the crucial part of information. However, maybe you would like to continue and read some background information and some interesting facts about this kind of assessment.

I am LOVING the crust I get from the 00 flour! I now bake a pizza every 3 or 4 days and am getting better at forming the crust. Still don't have the courage to try a toss, but it doesn't seem necessary. This dough had been in the fridge for 3 days before I divided it today.

The only change from my last bake was upping the hydration. I proofed it on parchment paper that I did not flour well enough. After the turn, the dough was welded to the parchment, which no doubt affected the shape. Nice open crumb though. Next step 90%.

Happy baking, Ski

Most weekends I bake two loaves of Tartine Country Bread.  I like the repetition of making the same recipe and enjoy seeing how my bread progresses from week to week.

I decided to live on the edge yesterday and make the Tartine Polenta bread.  I used some leftover pumpkin seeds from Thanksgiving, as well as thyme and chives instead of rosemary.  Next time, I’ll either add more herbs or skip them altogether.  I thought I used a generous amount but they’re barely detectable in the final loaves.

My daughter has rheumatoid/psoriatic arthritis and decided to try going gluten free to see if it would help her pain and fatigue. We have a wonderful gluten free bakery here but things are rather expensive and I found that their rolls went hard after one day. When I did some research on TFL, I came across this recipe for Gluten Free Flax Bread. When the OP said that her family couldn't tell the difference between the gluten free and the regular bread, I decided to give it a shot.

At the Health Food Store, I discovered whole Kamut/khorasan grains so I decided to sprout them and include them in a loaf. I also love the moisture I get from adding porridge flakes to my bread so that got included too as well as whole grain Kamut flour. So here is what I came up with:

Measure out 100 g of Kamut berries and spout them over two days.

Yesterday i moved one notch further on my journey through Hamelman, attempting his Vermont Sourdough with Increased Whole Grain.  Ambition got ahead of my scheduling ability: as soon as I had mixed the flour and water, I realized that i wasn't going to finish in time for my evening plans and this bread was going to be an experiment in extended fermentation.  Despite doubling the fermentation time from the recipe, the results were pretty, darn good.  If Forkish's times are far too long, are Hamelman's schedules too short?

Well somehow the photo and text did not post the first time. I will try again. I have baked a couple of bricks in a row at 80 and 82% hydration using P. Reinhart's suggested dough handling technique, which involves a gentle letter fold.

I found a different technique on youtube, (breadhitz) which does not use the fold, but trims a small scrap of dough from the side and places the scrap on top to proof. Once proofed the loaf is inverted to trimmed bits down and baked. I loved the way this loaf turned out and love the way it tastes! I have eaten most of the loaf in less than a day.