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Having recently tried Syd's version of a San Fran SD, I thought it was a good time to revisit DM Snyder's very different version. When I baked it a couple of months ago, my sense of taste had been annihilated by a shocker of a head cold, so was curious to try it again now that I'm back to salivating, savouring, gluttonous normality.

Yesterday, with warmed weather and some time to fire up my oven.  I made several pizza's for us and the neighbors.  

The oven was a little cold.  So a slow buildup from smaller fires to larger hotter ones where done through the day.  I made use of the smaller firing for my favorite roasted peppers and Italian sausages.

Nine Weeks’ Baking; summarised

A lot to write about, I suppose, given I have not managed to post a blog entry for almost nine weeks, mainly because I have been so busy, and tied up with so many baking-related activities.

A nice lunch for two featuring store bought (inside out and grilled) and home made ciabatta, beer can and teriyaki chicken.

With some Mojo de Ajo (with achoite and chili flakes) and the apple strawberry and ginger crisp.

Having the rye starter all pampered and fired up, I wanted to bake some filling rye breads this weekend.

I had some leftover sweet potatoes from dinner the other night and after refreshing my starter I decided it was time to concoct something new and different.

We haven’t made SD ciabatta in a long time and wanted to make one that included some YW in the levain, had some semolina, rye and WWW for flavor while using mostly AP and a little bread flour for the rest of the dry.  We added some VWG to up the gluten of this dough and improve its crumb.  We also took some of our standard pizza dough ingredients; the mix of herbs, garlic and sun dried tomato and added them with some chia seeds.

I had a really rough start trying to get wild yeast to colonize on everything from a bag of NoName All Purpose to grinding some wheat berries into a rough flour with a spice blender; I think I've tried every starter recipe out there including a few from books.  I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong so I sent off a SASE and cleaned the fridge of my other experiments when "Carl" arrived.