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Today's bake: Hazelnut and Fig Levain

Bread - A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes - Jeffery Hamelman 2nd Ed.

This bread is made from a majority of  bread flour, some 100% Stone Ground Whole Wheat Flour and a bit of whole rye which is in the culture. The Hazelnut, Fig, and Anise add-ins really dominate the flavor of this bread.

This is my second attempt making this bread and I am still trying to dial-in the following:

All - just wanted to thank this site for the great information - have been referencing this as I worked through a method on making baguettes that are crowd pleasers at my home:

Although my overall baking activity is less than it used to be, I have made some breads recently.

First up, cranberry-orange cream cheese braids. These were donated to a fundraising cookie walk that our local Friends of the Library held.

I also baked some small sweet vanilla challot yesterday that will be gifted to friends:

Paul

I need some lard for baking. Instead of buying hydrogenated lard at the supermarket, I air fry strips of (lightly seasoned) pork fat @ 200°C x 13 minutes to render lard. Re-fry the strips @ 200°C until crispy and use them in soup noodles, fry rice, or eat them as is as a snack.

I've tried making a single baguette a few different times.  Each time was a different recipe and each time it was a last minute "Let's throw this together and make a baguette" approach.  Got really lucky the first time with nice spring and an open crumb.  Told myself that baguettes were easy.  The next couple of tries had no spring at all and turned out dense enough to be used as dowel rods.  This is the first time I went into it with a plan.  I based the approach off Boubasa's recipe, but I used a flour blend that I had recent success with on a regular yeasted

Haven't posted anything for a while, thought to rectify with this quick and easy recipe for sourdough deli rye bread.

Here is the formula: https://fgbc.dk/2rfu

A visit to Fort Lauderdale wouldn’t be the same anymore without visiting with Alan (Alfanso) and his lovely wife.  We spent last evening chatting about life, travels and many other topics and a little bit about bread (actually very little). We were lucky enough to get to enjoy Alan’s famous baguettes.  In this case he had baked a set of Hamelman’s seed SD baguettes that I have always admired in his posts.  Well I can say that they look and taste even better than the photos and descriptions on TFL make them appear.

This loaf was a gift to Alfanso (Alan) and his wife.  We got together for a lovely evening at their place here in Fort Lauderdale last night so I wanted to bring them something different so I came up with the idea to use mashed cooked sweet potato with some cinnamon as a filling for a milk bread.  The baked loaf had some structural issues that made me concerned that it was either overproofed, underbaked (due to the added moisture of the sweet potato) or just too tall to handle its height.

The latest twist and shout version of Maura and Martin’s “Don’t be a bread hostage.” I had some cooked rolled oats leftover from breakfast and mixed it in to make a porridge bread. 

After a long hiatus, I've returned to panettone. I started training a new LM a couple weeks ago and attempted my first bake. This is a 1kilo alto, following the EIDB recipe (with a couple small modifications). I scaled the recipe a little too small and didn't account for mixing loss so I ended up with only a 950g loaf in a 1000g mold. I think I would have had more volume with 1050-1100g. 

My primo still suffered from being overly acidic in terms of PH but it smelled nice and not sour so I went with it. Still working on this. Solving this is the big mystery.