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I finally achieved a proper, (if off-center) ear on one of the loaves, so I'm overjoyed.  I thought I made deep enough cuts into the round loaf, but apparently not.  I really enjoyed incorporating a soaker, and this dough was quite easy to work with.  The crumb seems good to me, but I welcome any criticisms.  It felt like cheating using both levain and commercial yeast, but I love the recipe.  Changes made from previous Hamelman Vermont SD bake:

Foreground is cinnamon, sugar chocolate babka. I enjoyed the last one so much it was time to bake another. I used 2 x 300 gram balls of dough to roll out the babka. The remaining 253 grams of pulla dough was used to roll out the blueberry cream cheese bread front right.  In behind is a ciabatta style loaf with 20% durham semolina which resulted in a really nice snap to the crust!

Well, I was on my way to the ski hill and then it started raining.

Happy baking! Ski

We recently had a surplus of eggs and we need to find ways on how to use them before they go bad. Our chickens are really prolific layers that their eggs can't even fit anymore in our fridge for storage. We made the usual, salted eggs and flan (with whole eggs) but there are still many left and more are added each day. We made egg salad with about three dozen eggs but there were still seven remaining. I think this is the perfect time for me to try an egg bread and make an experiment.

Now, this is not a bread recipe, not even a recipe using sourdough, but I felt I had to post it, as they turned out so tasty!

My version of Russian Blini, can be served with anything from caviar to chocolate spread. Full recipe on my blog here 

Missed St. Patrick's day with this one but that was the inspiration. It has a good presence of fresh ground sprouted rye flour, about 33%, and soaked barley berries, 20%. There is also some WWW and AP with a total whole grain percentage of about 67%. Used starter, a bulk fermentation retard, and an egg wash with a caraway seed sprinkle. Baked on a cast iron tray covered for the first bit by a stainless steel mixing bowl. Can hardly wait to cut this one but will restrain for several hours. In retrospect should have used stout for the soaking and hydrating.

Stu

Hi Freshloafers!!

A big thank you to every one who has give me advice on how to improve my sourdough loaves. This is now loaf number four (using more or less the same formula), a vast improvement from loaf 1...

This weekend's bake was a basic sourdough loaf. Its got a bit of everything in there, I used my 100% rye starter and white flour to build my levain, and then a 1:4 whole wheat to white flour ratio for the rest of the dough.

As of late I've been moving towards a double score on my batards rather than what has become my standard single score.  I am pleased with the results I've seen so far.  The trick, and it is a learned trick, is to keep both blooms as consistent with each other as possible rather than having one big bubble of a bloom and one not so much.  I'm getting there.  And another trick to now put into my bag.  More practice will have to happen to lock it in.

Hamelman Pain au Levain with mixed starters

Had some trouble with my camera so I couldn't access the pics til today. Sry :(

So here's what happened on Day 4:

All the raisins collected on the top. I'm starting to see signs of the raisins breaking down. Their edges are ragged and there's sediment collecting at the bottom of the jar.

After shaking, the raisins dispersed throughout the jar. It took over an hour for the to re-collect at the top.

The lid made a popping sound when I opened it and there were more bubbles floating on the water's surface.

It's been close to 3 months since my last post and I hope all TFLoafers are doing fine. While the sales of my baking business have improved a fair bit....and as the saying goes....you win some...you lose some.