Yes, this will be no post for all of us who new years resolution is  healthy wholesome eating. And I have to admit that after one slice of this bread I head to it a lot of fruits and vegetables to save my conscience. But (and here are now the excuses why I baked it anyway) it was love on first sight and I need a complex bread for relaxing because of all the stress I have in the last month before starting to write my Ph.D. thesis.

The idea for this bread had TXfarmer who baked some time ago a “Lamminated Sandwich Bread”. Her bread looks better then mine, she really knows how to bake laminated pastry. Her Croissants are a dream! The dough is a soft sandwich bread laminated with butter. After a single and a double fold the dough is cut into stripes and braided.

I did some modifications so that the recipe fits better to the weaker german flour. And this time I mixed the butter for laminating with some flour to make the handling easier. It works good for puff pastry for me and it helps here, too.

And how tastes this bread? A soft and evenly open crumb with a divine taste of butter, like a good croissant.

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And now we have 2012. I hope your new years eve was nice as the one we had!

We tried already our new year pretzel for a late breakfast, so there are no pictures of the pretzel as a whole.

This year I decided to bake it with a mild sourdough, water roux and less sugar. I kept the sourdough overnight at 25°C which gave it a delicious smell like yoghurt and slightly sour taste, which makes it perfect for a sweet dough.

The dough itself is very soft. Experience with handling soft dough is required, so for beginners I would suggest to prepare the dough with 50-60g less water. That would make handling much easier.

I kneaded the dough very long, so the gluten network was well developed and the bread could rise highly. Using Egg white keeps the crumb bright and white. I think its fit to the fresh new years morning and I used some frozen egg white from christmas baking.

The pretzel has a nice complex taste, a little bit of youghurt and has this slightly sweetness, that fits so well to both sweet jam and salty cheese.

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Some time ago I saw a delicious looking bread that Judd baked: Pain aux levain aux grains melanges. I’m in love with breads containing mixed seeds and so I put the bread on my todo list.

This week I managed to bake it, finally – but with some adjustments. The sunflower seeds vanished magically before I started to bake bread and so I replaced them with hazelnuts. I love hazelnuts in autumn breads so for me the change was not so hard. Normally I have grains for home milled whole grain flour and white flour with Type number 550 so I adjust the ratio between the different flour types, because the flours I used had different Type numbers compared with the ones that Judd use.

The bread I get is delicious, full of flavors of sourdough, nuts and seeds and with a moist crumb because of the soaker.

If you want to win my Advent calender you have still time to do enter your name here until today night (13. November 2011, 23.59 Uhr).

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MC had the good idea to bake a local bread that contains ingredients which are an expression of the surrounding area. In my opinion this is a beautiful idea and especially in autumn there are a lot of local things that one could put in a bread to catch the essence of “Home”.

I changed her recipe so it resembles my home: A rustic country loaf, with the apple juice made from windfall fruits(Streuobstwiesen with apple trees are very typical here), hazelnuts and summer flower honey from a local bee keeper.

The apples I use are from an old apple tree in my parents garden. My grandparents planted about 50 years ago when they build the house. I love this tree. When I was small I often sat in the crown of this apple tree feeling safe and sheltered there. Later a nearly level branch became my “horse” with reins and stirrups made of rope. I spent many hours “riding” during dream worlds. mehr…

I have the feeling that autumn is already knocking timidly on my door. I knew that it is still august, in theory it is still midsummer, but after all the rainy days in the past weeks and with the fact that the days already started to get shorter I feel a little bit like autumn. Don’t understand me wrong, I cherish the change of season. It is like George de Santayana says:  “To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” And I love the change from summer to autumn – maybe because I was born in this special atmosphere between theses seasons in September 29 years ago.

When my mom asked me if I would like to take the second half of a butternut squash I had directly the idea of putting the squash in a bread dough. I like butternut squash very much, it sweet and creamy taste and the stunning colour makes it to one of my favourite winter squash.

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It seems like I would spent each wake moment in the lab. I try not to spent the nights there, but I start very early in the morning and at the moment I work very often one day of the weekend, too. There is a silver line on the horizon, promising that I will finish the missing experiments very soon and that we can resubmit our paper in near future. For me this means although a well deserved vacation!

Due to the enormous amount of work I have less time for Blogging. I still bake bread, take pictures and write down new recipes, but to put everything together as a post is not so easy at the moment.

When baking at the moment I use recipes that need not so much time each day. My favourites are those recipes that requires proofing over night.

This light sourdough bread is such a recipe. It taste very nutty because of roasted rolled grains and seeds, it is very fluffy and soft and it has a deep complex taste due to the two preferments and the long, cold proof.

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Whenever Martin posts a new Bread recipe I read the recipe attentively. His simple recipes and methodes are always worth a try.

This time he was inspired from Tartines Book Bread (its on my wishlist, too) and proofed his bread overnight in the fridge. For the dough he tested both kneading the dough with the kitchen machine and his gentle folding methode and both worked fine for him.

I changed the recipe a little bit (something that wouldn’t surprise anyone) because I don’t like to eat only white bread during the week. When I eat white bread I get hungry again much to fast. That does not happen when I eat bread with whole grain. And so I replace one third of the flour with whole spelt flour.

The bread I drew out of the oven is delicious, with an open crumb and a thick crust.  It taste complexly of sourdough and whole grain, mild and not very sour. And it’s not complicated, it only needs a little bit time and scheduling. A new favourite!

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When Lutz describes a bread with the words “a new favourite” then I know that I have to try this bread by myself. And a bread with sourdough, whole wheat and seeds is always tempting for me.

And so I did not wait long until I bake this recipe. I made some small changes, like roasting the seeds before soaking them and I made the sourdough with freshly milled wheat. My third change is that I bake the bread a little bit longer, so that I get thick aromatic crust.

The resulting bread is delicious, an easy to handle dough, with a very good ovenspring and a great taste. I can just repeat what Lutz already said: A new favourite! mehr…

This bread has a  “black spirit”. Black beer, dark molasse and “black wheat” (aka Buckwheat) create a nearly black crust and a deep brown crumb. The crumb looks much darker then you would guess from the amount of about 50% whole grain.

The recipe is a kind of using up leftovers. Breadcrumbs made of dried stale bread slices, some dark beer leftover from weekeend cooking and some leftover buckwheat flour which I broughed home from the summer holidays in the Lüneburge Heath (where buckwheat is still grown).

Buckwheat is an old crop, that grows well on low-fertility soil, thats why its often found to be grown in regions like heath. From the botanical view it is no grain but the fruit of a plant from the “knotweed family” (Polygonaceae). The flour contains no gluten so it should added in a low amount to bread doughs.

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Finding recipes for the 37. Bread Baking Day was an easy task for me – it was much harder to make a decision what I want to bake because the topic “Bread with preferment/sponge” is really my kind of bread making. Nearly all breads and pastry I bake are made with one or more preferment.  One very delicious is JT’s Rustic bread with three preferments. It use three diffrent Preferments: Poolish, Biga, Sourdough. And this three diffrent preferments create an incredible tasty bread.

For my entry for BBD I planed something similar. Poolish, sourdough and Pâte fermentée make this bread very aromatic. With a nutty taste of whole wheat and the complex flavours of the preferments with a mild acidity in the background. The bread has a fine crumb and a thick crisp crust.

To get a nice crisp crust I used the convection modus of my oven and opend the door slightly ajar, so that the steam can escape and the cust becomes crisp.

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