What better recipe to make on Easter weekend than traditional English hot cross buns?!  Plus, I had never made hot cross buns before and have always been curious about them, so this is the recipe I chose for this week.

The first thing that you do is to mix up a very watery (500% hydration) sponge and set it aside for 40 minutes.  Surprisingly enough since the amount of flour wasn't much, the sponge did rise and become frothy.

Making the dough was pretty straight forward ...just mix everything together, add sponge, and when it's all coming together then add the fruits.

For this recipe, you do not make the crosses on the buns with icing.  Instead, you use the more traditional method of making a sweetened flour paste which is then piped over the buns to create the crosses before baking.

After baking, you brush the buns with a 50/50 sugar-water glaze and then let the buns cool.

These were a great hit with the family and they were gone within 24 hours of being baked.

Ireland is a country that I used to travel to on a regular basis for business, and I have enjoyed several types of Irish Soda Bread in addition to some rather interesting soda bread concoctions such as the Irish Soda Bread Bruschetta that I had in a restaurant hiding up an alleyway behind our hotel on Stephen's Green in Dublin.  As a result, I was very curious how Jeffrey Hamelman's Irish soda bread would turn out.  Well, I'm happy to say that Jeffrey's soda bread is very close to what I found in Ireland as far as what I would call the "medium dark" soda breads went.  In Ireland, you also find lighter and sweeter varieties, not just a single kind that one might call the 'most traditional'.  I like them all and ate them daily.  BTW, the Bruschetta was made on soda bread that was slightly sweeter than Jeffrey's, but I'm certain that a couple of tablespoons of medium molasses and maybe a tad more salt would duplicate the bread fairly closely.

Because I wanted to make this soda bread as authentically as I could, I decided to forgo using standard store-bought buttermilk in this recipe.  What I did instead, was to use my favorite whole milk and some Buttermilk Culture (C21) from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company in Massachusetts to make my own.  It's fairly easy to make ...you just warm your milk to around 72 F, sprinkle the culture on the milk, wait 2 or 3 minutes for it to rehydrate, then cover and set aside for 18 to 24 hours.  Another way to make it is to buy cultured buttermilk (look for 'active cultures' on the label) and mix it with milk at a ratio of 1:4, then let it sit in similar temperatures for a similar amount of time.  You can tell that the buttermilk is ready when it has "clabbered".

The buttermilk has clabbered when it forms a film on the sides of your container when you tip the buttermilk back and forth, and usually, when the buttermilk has taken a set (see photo at right) ...almost like a very soft yogurt.  To finish the buttermilk, you just use a whisk to stir it until it forms a consistent, thick and pourable, consistency.  In general, I do not like the buttermilk from the stores, but I really do like homemade buttermilk.  It's just better, that's all (try it!)

Also in preparation for making this recipe, you need to obtain, and grind, wheat flakes.  Wheat flakes look identical to oat meal flakes except in color ...they are darker than oat meal flakes.  Jeffrey recommends the use of a food processor for converting the flakes into a rough meal, but I used my Country Living Grain mill for the purpose instead, just tightening up the grinding wheels enough to disallow whole flakes from passing through.  This is the result (left).

Next, as is typical for most quick breads that need gentle handling, you put all dry ingredients into a bowl and whisk them together so that they are premixed and so that after adding the liquid ingredient(s), you will only need to do a minimum amount of mixing.

Since the only liquid that is in this recipe is the buttermilk, it is added next.  I utilized a dutch dough whisk to help provide the most thorough mixing with the least amount of agitation/handling of the dough as possible.  If you don't have one of these, you might consider getting one.  I have one large one and one small one, both from King Arthur Flours, and love them both.  This recipe required the smaller of the two.

Here is the dough after mixing in the buttermilk, shaping into a round patty, and placing on parchment paper.  As you can tell from the photo, this dough is definitely on the soft side and requires well-floured hands and a quick non-lingering approach to shaping it.

Being a quick bread, this recipe has no bulk or final ferment.  I think I waited perhaps 10 minutes or so from shaping until it was put it in the oven.  The photo to the right shows the dough sprinkled with flour and cut approximately 80% through with a dough blade in the traditional North-South-East-West Irish pattern.

How did it turn out?  Great!  It had very good oven spring and a beautiful color!  It took about 10 minutes for the loaf to finish rising in the oven, and a total of 30 minutes to bake (15 minutes at 475 F plus 15 minutes at 450 F).

The crumb was light and moist, and full of good grain flavor.  This is definitely a recipe that I will make again.  It toasted well and was just wonderful with a nice schmear of cream cheese on it!

What would I do differently next time?

• Really nothing ...although I may use this recipe as a foundation for some further experiments.  For example, I may enhance it with a bit more salt and 2 or 3 tablespoons of molasses to see if I can duplicate the kind of soda bread that was used for the Bruschetta mentioned at the beginning of this article... a very nice surprise in that a Bruschetta made with Irish Soda Bread went so well with the Roma tomatoes and olive oil... I have long since missed it!
  

Mmmm... warm dinner rolls!

Didn't take too many pictures this time around!  Here you can see the blend of ingredients (high-gluten flour, whole-wheat flour, rye flour) and the soaker (rolled oats, flax seeds, wheat bran, and cornmeal).  I guess the "fifth grain" is the wheat flour?  The rye flour?  Dunno...

And here it is with all the ingredients in the mixer ready to be mixed ...egg, soaker, oil, water, salt, and yeast added.

I made this recipe into rolls since it was for a potluck at work (the boss's boss's boss's birthday party).  Making it was very easy.  Just set up the soaker and let it soak until the flax seed seem to swell a little (overnight), the mix it all on first speed for 3 minutes, second speed for 3 minutes, 2 hour bulk ferment with a fold at 1 hour, then shape, ferment 1-1/4 hours and bake.

I tried to produce a slightly-sweet wash for the top of the rolls by making an egg white/water egg wash with a little bit of medium molasses thrown in ...but it didn't work.  The wash, after baking, had no sweetness at all but it did add a kind of nice golden hue to the tops of the rolls.  Flavor was not spectacular and seemed too complex as though too many different grains were competing for attention, plus the rolls were a bit on the bland side.  I wonder if they'd be better with a bit more salt, a sweetener and maybe a bit of milk to soften them, and a retardation given to the dough to bring out the flavor of the individual grains a bit more?  Hamelman did mention that this formula seems to do best with an overnight retardation step.  As partial proof to that, note that the rolls did develop a much nicer flavor after having aged in a plastic bag for a few days.  My wife really liked them.

I actually finished baking my way through Chapter 4 of Hamelman's book, and was about to start Chapter 5 but realized my levain was running a bit on the weak side.  Followed by travel and some neglect, it was even worse ...so I decided to switch and do a few straight doughs from Chapter 7 while I was working on getting my starter back in shape.  This oatmeal bread is one of the straight doughs that I've made.

Oatmeal soaker (slow-cook type in this case), soaked raisins, high-gluten flour (Power Flour from Pendleton Flour Mills), whole-wheat flour (King Arthur), honey, oil, salt, cinnamon, and yeast.  (Milk and water not shown.)  For the milk, all we had was skim, so I mixed in a bit of cream to get the fat content up to about a whole milk would be.

Jeffrey gave two different weights of dough for two different pans ...but the dough weight (ounces) per unit volume (cubic inches) was not consistent between them.  I carefully measured my pans, calculated their volume, then scaled the recipe according to the average of what Jeffrey gave.  As you can see in the loaves above, this turned out to be too small for my pans.  Great bread, but I'll go with the greater weight next time, and then some probably, since I like a good mushroom top coming out over the top of the bread pan (classic loaf shape)

The raisins are added after everything else is mixed ...and I had trouble getting them to mix in when using just the mixer.  As you can see, their moistness created a sort of slippery coating on the inside of the bowl and the dough hook just spun things in circles without incorporating the raisins.  I ended up kneading the raisins in by using in-the-bowl kneading.  It worked, even if not perfectly consistently.

The dough was made up on a Friday night, then I let it retard at 42 F until mid-morning Saturday.  It took perhaps 4 or 5 hours for the middle of the dough to warm to something above 60 F (even though the room was at 70-72 F).  I folded once after the dough had been in the fridge for one hour, then wrapped it up and left it for the next day.

Here, you can see the juice from the raisins soaking into the surrounding dough.  This staining effect went away as soon as I started shaping the dough.  I think it was just on the surface where the raisins touched the plastic wrap.

Once the dough had warmed to 62 F or so, I formed it into a boule, cut it in two, and performed a light pre-shaping before allowing it to rest (covered) for 20 minutes.

Each loaf was then formed into tight loaves which I then spritzed with cool water and rolled all sides in rolled oats.

And here is the finished product.  The bread rose fine and had great oven spring, but they were just a bit small for my pans as you can see.

Here is the crumb ...those darn raisins turned out to be fairly evenly distributed after all!

The crumb was a nice medium crumb that kept the bread fairly light.  It also toasted nice and evenly too, tasting great with a bit of cream cheese spread on it.  The overall flavor was a nice warm and wholesome blend of wheat and cinnamon, slightly nutty, and with the raisins adding a nice sweet finish.  Between the wife and kids, these two loaves were completely gone within 18 hours from when they left the oven!

I've been looking forward to trying this recipe... since I love both bread and beer!

This recipe utilizes 10.9 oz beer, which is half the liquid in the recipe, roasted barley berries, and mostly white plus a little whole wheat flour to produce a nice cream colored luxuriant loaf of bread.  Living in Alaska, I had to naturally use an Alaskan beer, right?

Step 1 of course, which is so commonly used as a yeasted preferment, is the poolish.  In this case, the poolish is made from about 1/3rd of the bread flour, water, and 1/8 tsp instant dry yeast and left to ferment for 12 to 16 hours.  I find this works well at our room temperature, which is only about 68 F during this time of year.

While the book calls for buying plain malted barley, e.g. from a beer brewing supply house, that you then roast on a sheet in your oven, I chose to do something different ...I chose to buy a pre-kilned malt barley from the beer brewing supply store instead.  The recipe states that one goal for the roasting is to deactivate enzymes that may otherwise interfere with the fermentation of the dough, I looked through all of the mid- and higher-roasted malted barley and also the crystal (or 'caramel') roasted barleys, tasting each to find out which I thought would go best in a beer bread.  I ended up picking Crystal-40, a Lovibond 40 colored crystal malt.  Crystal malts are made by sprouting (malting) barley followed by an intermediate wet kilning to convert starches into sugars and then a higher-temperature dry kilning to develop the flavor and color to the desired depth through the Maillard Reaction (caramelization of the sugars).  In the photo above, you can see the amber darkness of the grain inside the lighter colored hulls.  As an afterthought, I realized that this also marries well with the Alaskan Amber that I used since Crystal-40 is a common malt used in brewing amber beers.

As specified in the recipe, the roasted malt needs to be ground or crushed to prepare it for the dough.  The malt is not softened by a soaker, so it must be crushed to a fine grain in order to avoid having hard grain buried in the bread.  I used a loose setting on my Country Living Grain mill to crush my malt and it worked great.

Here is what the malt looked like before (left) and after (right) crushing with the Country Living Grain Mill.  Notice how crushing resulted in the grain being crushed and the release of the hulls from the grain.  A purest might have tossed the grain in the wind, or at least in front of a fan, to remove the hulls from the grain but I didn't.  My wife and I both agreed that we liked the flavor of the hulls in the grain and that the extra fiber wouldn't hurt anyone.

Now for the fun part ...the mixing of all these wonderful ingredients together.  On the left, you can barely see the poolish under the other ingredients, the whole wheat flour, the white (bread) flour, yeast, salt, and the crushed malt.  On the right, you can see the measured/weighed 10.9 oz of Alaskan Amber beer.

It seems that although I have calculated the friction factor for my mixer, e.g. when making 3-minute first speed plus 3-minute second speed doughs, that every make tends to be another experiment in trying to hit the final temperature.  In this case, I know that my friction factor is 21 to 23 ...and it looks like I should've used a high 23 rather than 21 when mixing this dough since it heated up more than expected.  My desired dough temperature (DDT) calculation claimed that I needed 78 F beer (liquid) in order to reach a DDT of 75 F.  In reality, my dough reached 78+ F, so I should use a friction factor of 25 or so next time.

After mixing, I formed a boule and set the dough aside to ferment for an hour.  At one hour, I gave it a folding and let it ferment another hour.  They hydration appears to be perfect (68% when including all water and beer).

Rather than form oval or round loaves for baking on the stone, I decided to bake this recipe in standard loaf form with my normal bread pans.  We tend to make a lot of sandwiches for lunch, and this shape is more popular at our house.  But to make the loaves prettier and to have more character, I decided to top them with crushed barley as well.  To do that, I created crushed barley by first crushing with my mill and then by shaking up and down in a colander ("blocking" in the mill world) to remove the hulls while the barley fell through.  I expected that if I left the hulls on the surface of the bread, that they may burn prematurely during the bake.

It took two passes through the colander to remove most of the hulls.  As you can see in the left photo, I was able to remove 90% of the hulls (as seen in the right photo).

Here are the dressed up loaves, nearly ready for the bake.  I painted the loaves down with a mild egg wash made from one egg white and a little less than a quarter cup of cool water.  The egg wash helps things like seeds, or crushed barley in this case, stick to the top of the loaves.  I scored the loaves with one long scoring down the middle followed by scissor cuts at an angle that alternated left and right up the loaf.

And here's the result!  I did go ahead and bake these as though they were free form loaves.  The bake started at 460 F with steam and was kept at that temperature until the loaves showed some color at which time I propped the door open with a spoon to finish the loaves in a drying oven.  Then, because pan loaves are reject moisture slower than free form loaves do, I gave them longer in the oven by reducing the head to 440 F.  These loaves baked in 40 minutes.

The crumb, texture, and nature of the crust came out perfect!  The flavor was full, had a slight crunch from the barley, and all components were very nicely balanced against each other.

Hmmm... 3 of 4 people living in this household claim they like corn bread, but one is adamant that she doesn't.  Hmmm... I won't mention my wife Heidi's name on that one, but leave it to say that she did like this corn bread!  I've made a lot of different types of corn bread in my life and they have ranged from flat and dense, made from pure corn meal, to light and fluffy and made more in the style of Johnny Cake (cornbread + flour).  My grandfather, now deceased, left us with probably the best Johnny Cake recipe in the world (and my wife didn't like it), and I am happy to share the recipe with the world out of respect for the man and his cooking (recipe follows at the end of this blog post).  Jeffrey Hamelman's corn bread is actually 66% white flour and only 33% corn meal.

This recipe uses and overnight poolish that does not contain any of the corn meal in it.  I assume that the corn meal may sour if left in a poolish overnight.

After 14 hours, the poolish was quite full of bubbles, which was a little bit of a surprise since the poolish only contains 1/8th teaspoon instant yeast.

The poolish, bread flour, fine corn meal, water, salt, yeast, extra-virgin olive oil ...and the corn meal soaker (right).  Everything is just dumped into a mixing bowl, mixed on first speed for 3 minutes, then on second speed for another 3 minutes.

Hydration and temperature notes:
DDT: 76 F ...and all other ingredients, including the poolish, were at 70 F.  My DDT calculation said to use 67 F water, so I did.  The dough temperature at the end of the mix was 74 F, 2 degrees low.  I think part of that reason is because the hydration was a bit high and I should've added a few grams of bread flour at the end of the first 3 minute mixing.  I'm guessing the hydration turned out 2 or 3 percent higher than it should have for my particular set of flours and corn meal.

Mix ...mix ...mix...

The dough cleaned the bowl just fine, but still, it was a little high in hydration...

And here's the result ...a mostly white loaf with corn meal interspersed through it.  (Yes, a bit on the sticky side as well)

Still sticky after the first fold ...my corn meal must not have absorbed much of the water.

The dough had finally become a little less sticky by the time the bulk ferment had finished and was finally showing a little ability to hold its own... what a nice creamy color!  I'll bet this is going to be good!

Jeffrey's instructions say to allow the dough to rise in a 75 F environment.  There is no such place in our house, in March, in Alaska!  If I keep my oven closed with the light on for several hours, then it barely maintains 75 F inside, so that's where I allowed the dough to rise.  Note that I did cover these with a warm damp towel and some plastic wrap (not shown) so they'd stay supple during the final ferment.

And here they are, ready for the oven.  I flipped each onto parchment paper that I then cut down so it was the same shape as the loaves and only a little larger.  Both loaves were loaded onto the hot stone together.  These loaves were baked in a steamy 460 F oven which was propped open a bit (a drying oven) when the loaves started to show color.

And here's the result!  Oven spring was a little bit better than I expected.  My shaping skills are finally starting to improve a little as well, and so are my scoring skills (although both still have a long way to go)

The crumb turned out surprisingly light and the crust was marvelous.  I really like how the crusts have been turning out when baked at 460 in a steamed, then drying, oven ala Hamelman!  The flavor was a nice creamy grainy type of flavor with only a hint of corn flavor to it.  I would say the corn (stronger flavored) was in perfect balance with the wheat (more subtly flavored).  And ..as I stated, this is the first corn bread that my wife (she who eats no corn bread) liked!  As it turns out, this bread toasts very evenly, and tastes great with a good schmear of my homemade cultured cream cheese on it...

Almost forgot!  Here is my grandfather's corn bread recipe (which we affectionately call 'the mother of all corn breads corn bread"

Grandpa Dixon's Johnny Cake (aka Corn Bread)

2 c. all-purpose white flour
1 c. yellow corn meal
6 tsp baking powder
2 beaten eggs
1 tsp salt
1/3rd c. cooking oil
1/3rd c. sugar
1-1/2 c. buttermilk

Mix all dry ingredients together.  In a separate bowl, mix all liquid ingredients
together.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet and gently combine.  As with
pancakes, stop mixing when the ingredients are barely wetted.  Pour into a greased
baking pan and bake at 425 F for 20 to 25 minutes or until done.

NOTE: I do like this best when baked in cast iron ...there's something about
johnny cake that just screams "I should be in cast iron!!"

This recipe comes from my (now passed) grandfather, Ralph Dixon of Oregon, and is one of several that he was somewhat famous for. It is absolutely the fluffiest, lightest, best tasting johnnycake that I've ever had ... even better with butter melting into it and honey drizzled over it! Pure heaven on earth!

After eating this, you'll never eat plain cornbread again!

After seeing a few online and hearing their descriptions, I've always wanted to try a semolina bread.  Fortunately for me, there's one in Jeffrey Hamelman's book Bread, and it was on the list of recipes in The Bread Challenge that I'm working my way through!

Jeffrey's semolina bread uses what is called a flying sponge.  No, it's not a sponge that didn't turn out so you tossed it across the room towards the trash can ...it's a sponge made from flour(s), water, all of the recipe's yeast, and maybe a little sugar.  What makes it a flying sponge in particular is the fact that it is left to ferment to the very peak of ripeness and just about ready to fall.

Before making the sponge however, I took a look at the semolina flour that I had, and it felt just a tad on the gritty side, so my son and I reground it with my Country Living Grain Mill ...one of my favorite toys!  This mill is easy to use, as far as manual mills go, and produces a very fine flour.  In this case, I adjusted the plates for the finest grind and milled the semolina flour at that setting.  The result was a silky smooth, almost like cake flour, version of semolina flour.  BTW, credit where credit is due ...if you are going to buy one of these mills, shop around for the best price and lowest shipping prices.  I bought mine from Homestead Products near Kamiah in North Idaho.  They had the best price (at the time) and free shipping ...for anywhere but Alaska.  But because I lived in Alaska where things are expensive to ship, the store owner cut me a special deal on the shipping (I won't say how cheap here since that's his business) and made me an offer that I couldn't refuse.  I highly recommend them with no misgivings at all... nice people to work with, good prices, and good selection of extras.

Here's a closer look at the reground semolina flour.  Hard to tell from the photo, but it was as smooth as silk and very fine.  The lumps and bumps are because the flour started to clump a little (from who knows what?  Static?  Kitchen humidity?).  Notice how the flour turned a light creamy color after grinding rather than keeping the "noodle-yellow" color that it had before grinding.  In order to have enough for the hole recipe (453 grams total), I ground 500 grams of flour just to make sure that I'd have enough even if some remained in the mill.

A nice medley of ingredients!  The recipe is really a 50:50 mix of white bread flour (King Arthur of course) and semolina flour.  Add salt, extra-virgin olive oil, and the sponge and that's all there is.  Speaking of the sponge ...how's it doing?

Livin' large and about to collapse!  The sponge is a 50:50 mix of bread flour and semolina as is the rest of the recipe.

Jeffrey said that the target temperature of the sponge at time of mixing is 78-80 F, so I assumed this would also be the best temperature for it to ferment in.  The idea is to keep it warm so it rises completely and quickly.  My gas oven maintains right about 78-79 F if the oven light is left on and the door closed, so that's where I allowed my sponge to rise.

I don't really have a friction factor figured out for my mixer when it is just being used to incorporate a few ingredients together, so I could not effectively calculate the temperature of the water that the sponge needed in order to hit the 78-80 F target.  My mix of ingredients in the sponge, minus water, was 68 F.  Part intuition and part rough guess, I chose to use 87 F water for the sponge hoping the temperature would come out right.  Why?  You can't just average the water and flour temperatures to come up with the target temperature because water is much denser and carries a lot more energy than the flour.  With the dry ingredients 11 degrees below target, I chose to use water that was 8 degrees above, hence the 87 F water.  Yup ...it did work!  The sponge temperature came out right at 78 F, so I covered it and popped it into my 79 F oven to ferment.  The picture above shows what it looked like 1 hour and 15 minutes later.  I measured the rest of the ingredients while the sponge was fermenting.

Once the sponge was ready, I put all ingredients, including the sponge (all at once) into the mixing bowl.  Run the mixer on first speed for 3 minutes, then second speed for 3 more, and this is what you get (right) ...a very smooth cream colored dough with very good gluten development, exactly the right amount of stickiness (you want a little so the dough will stick a bit to the counter when it is being folded), and nice extensibility.

Since the family was in need of sandwich bread and I assumed that this recipe would make a great sandwich bread, I decided to use my 37 year old blued-steel loaf pans.  I got these as a gift from my father back in 1974 when I was 14 years old and about a year into my bread baking career.  Every once in awhile, I strip the insides down as best I can with steel wool, degrease, and then re-blue them with a bluing kit intended for re-bluing rifle barrels.  After all this time, they are still going strong and still my favorite pans.  The steel and its color produces a bottom and side crust of identical thickness and color as the top crust ...really the perfect loaf pans.  I wish you could find something like these nowadays, but you can't.

Here is the dough 45 minutes into the bulk ferment.  I had already doubled and showed good loft.

At the end of the 1-1/2 hour bulk ferment, the dough was divided, shaped into two boules, covered and let rest for 20 minutes.  Then I formed two loaves and placed the dough seam-side-down into the pans as shown.  (I always use Crisco brand shortening and find that it gives the best release of all.)

Prior to baking, I spritzed the tops with water and sprinkled some raw sesame seeds on, then scored as shown.  Notice how the side crusts are the same color as the top crust.  The bottom crusts are too.

You should've smelled these when they were baking ...they filled the whole house with a warm buttery smell that has to be experienced to be believed.  I couldn't wait to see how the bread turned out...

Internal temperature was 200 F at 35 minutes in a 460 F oven.  I presteamed, steamed upon loading, then at about 15 minutes into the bake when the crust was beginning to take color, I propped the door slightly open to finish the loaves in a drying oven.  Speaking of which, the oven spring was great as you can see.

...So how did the bread turn out?  Well, I was afraid that the semolina would make the bread turn out heavier than a standard white loaf would, but I was completely wrong.  These loaves were very light, had high loft, and were very tender.  You had to hold the loaves gently while slicing in order not to crush the bread.  Notice the nice semi-open crumb and how the crust thickness is the same on top, bottom, and sides.

The flavor was very good and had a subtle 'something' that you really couldn't put your finger on that made the bread special.  My daughter said "tastes like donuts!".  I'm not sure I quite agree with that, but two loaves disappeared in two days and Deana was entirely to blame!  This bread would be great for sandwiches, or toast (it toasted very evenly), or french toast, or for ...just eating, as Deana did!

What I would do differently next time:

• Nothing ...perfect as is.  I might experiment with NOT re-grinding the semolina flour, or with other loaf shapes or toppings (poppy or flax seed comes to mind), and that sort of thing, but this recipe is perfect as-is.
  

I've really enjoyed the variety of bread types that Hamelman has been leading me through, and making this Golden Raisin and Walnut bread is no exception.  What could be bad about golden raisins and walnuts?

What you see above is the preferment, a somewhat stiff biga, as it looked the night before and morning of baking day.  It actually rose quite a bit, and darkened in color as well.  I'm not sure why it darkened a bit... I assume from some moisture loss even though I had it covered with plastic wrap.

Since I got a new mixer for my birthday last year and have been somewhat lazy about calculating a new friction factor for it so I could more accurately predict dough temperature after mixing, I decided to start taking the temperature of ingredients again (68-70 F is the rule around here).

My desired dough temperature (DDT) calculation:

75 F DDT x 4 = 300
minus 66 F flour temp.
minus 69 F room temp.
minus 69 F biga temp.
minus 26 F friction factor
...equals 70 F

=> Use a 70 F water temperature to reach a desired dough temperature of 75 F.  How did it turn out?  After mixing, my dough temperature was 72 F.  I will try a friction factor of 23 F next time (for standard 3-minutes at first speed, 3 to 3-1/2 minutes at second speed recipes).

At 72% hydration, this dough seemed too soft and I probably should have added some flour to stiffen it up prior to adding the raisins and walnuts.  I made a note in the book to reduce the hydration to 70% next time to see how that turns out.

Here is what the dough looked like after the first fold.  Still sticky ...usually a sticky dough will lose most of its stickiness by this point, but this one did not.  This corroborates my suspicion that the hydration was a little high ...which really means that the flours that I used absorbed less water than those used by Jeffrey when writing his book ...odd, since this is the dead of winter and the air is fairly dry right now.

I've been baking in loaf pans too much lately, so I decided to get out the ol' bannetons and give them a spin for this recipe.  Why not make pretty loaves once in awhile?

I flour my bannetons with Bob's Red Mill Rice Flour and it works very very well as a release agent.  Even this wet dough came right out without hesitation and zero sticking.

The fruits of my labor!  I really like the texture that I got from leaving the walnuts and raisins whole ...the way they made the crust lumpy and interesting turned out very nice!

As you can see in this photo, the crumb came out perfectly for this type of bread ...although I admit I expected it to be a bit more open considering the hydration, but maybe that's just my lack of experience speaking.  Also as you can see, this loaf did not rise high but tended to spread out a bit instead.  Oven spring was moderately good.

The flavors in this bread were outstanding!  The combination of the wheat, raisins, and walnuts was perfect and the fruits and nuts did not overpower or hide the subtleties in the wheat components.  I felt that the overall balance could not be better!  And it toasts very well too.  Having a slice of toast made from this bread, topped with my homemade cultured french cream cheese, is really good ...This bread is definitely one that goes on the favorites list!

This bread looked interesting since I love whole-grain breads in general.  For some reason, I was thinking it was a whole-wheat recipe until I actually set about making it ...and discovered that you use 100% standard bread flour, no whole-wheat at all.  Not a problem... looks and sounds great regardless.

Again, Jeffrey sort of lists the recipe steps out of order.  He shows step #1 as the step for creating the soaker (requires 4+ hours), yet shows as step #2 the step for creating the pate fermentee (requires 12+ hours).  No problem.  Just start the pate fermentee the night before baking day and get on with it.

The pate fermentee in this case, is just plain white bread flour, a little salt, a little yeast, and some cool water.  Just mix it up using the spiral dough hook enough to incorporate the ingredients, and no more, cover and set aside for the next day.

Here's the pate fermentee just before putting it to bed for the night.  I allowed mine to ferment for 12 hours at 70 F.  Hydration seemed a bit dry, but it's not so important at this point.

Getting up the next morning, it was time to make the soaker.  The soaker needs to soak for at least 4 hours and longer is OK.  I made mine at about 9am and intended to bake mid-afternoon ...about 5+ hours away.

This bread has 5 types of grain, one of which (wheat, obviously) is provided by the bread flour.  The other 4 grains (left to right, top to bottom) include rye chops, flax seed, dry roasted unsalted sunflower seeds, and old-fashioned rolled oats (slow cook type).

At 3pm in the afternoon, the soaker had soaked up all of the water ...completely.  If you looked closely, you could see that the sunflower and flax seeds had soaked up little to nothing (expected) and that the rye chops and oats appear to have swelled up with water instead.  It's a nice looking mixture!  Can't wait to see how the bread turns out!

After mixing with the spiral dough hook at first speed for 3 minutes, all of the pate fermentee incorporated in chunks by then, the dough seemed a little on the stiff side.  I added perhaps 3-1/2 teaspoons of cool water and allowed the dough to mix on second speed for 3-1/2 more minutes.  As you can see, the dough has plenty of strength, the bowl is clean, and the dough is just a tad sticky ...just right!

All of my ingredients were at 70 F, and the water that I added was at 72 F.  The resulting temperature after mixing came out to be 76 F, just slightly above the 75 F target.

Like Jeffrey's Whole-Wheat Bread (actually a 50/50 whole-wheat/white bread), this formula requires a 2-hour bulk ferment with one french fold at the 1 hour mark.  By the time the dough had fermented for an hour and was folded once, all stickiness had disappeared and the dough had very good elasticity and extensibility.

The seed and grain mixture was very attractive, plenty in the dough but not too much, and a nice flavorful mix.

At the end of the 2-hour bulk ferment, I chose to bake the bread in loaf pans rather than boules or bannetons.  For my loaf pans (my favorite 20+ year old blued steel pans), the dough filled them up a bit much.  I think I will scale this recipe down by 20% or so next time if I will be using these same pans.

Here is the wonderful finished product!  I was very happy with the results and the house was full of a wonderful nutty aroma!  It was difficult to allow these loaves to cool before slicing and trying!

These loaves are baked in a steamed 460 F oven that is then propped open to finish in a drying oven once the loaves show a little color.  As you can see on the right side of the right-hand loaf above, the loaf was just beginning to tear during the oven spring.  My bad.  I will both scale down the recipe 20% and will allow the final ferment to go an extra 30 minutes before baking.  Otherwise, I can name no improvements.

How'd the crumb turn out?  Perfect!  You cannot describe the blend of flavors in this bread, but you'll have to take my word for it... Jeffrey got this one just right!  Oven spring was tremendous and the crust was the perfect combination of thickness, flavor, and chewiness!  This recipe is definitely one that I will repeat over and over!