All hail Melissa Johnson, the weekly recipe inventor for the website and store, Breadtopia. Sign up for their free weekly newsletter and once a week, fresh to your Inbox, are two new recipes. (The signup is under the Connect tab on the website.) Melissa is endlessly creative with a strong sub-specialty in bringing breads of the world to your oven.
Here are a few examples of her recipes I’ve made in the last several weeks.
In the header (and again here) is her Whole Grain Lemon Ricotta Upside Down Cake. It is not sourdough, but it is delicious.
Below is Lepinja, a Balkan flatbread. Her version is sourdough with white kamut flour. I used freshly milled whole grain kamut and the result was rich, earthy, and complex. It’s meant to be eaten with Cevapi, grilled, skinless, sausages.
Here is sourdough Persian Barbari. The ridges are made with the sides of your hands.
I returned to an old favorite, Melissa’s 2019 recipe for Sourdough Focaccia (she has a yeast version, too). The whole wheat and sourdough add plenty of interest that plain white flour focaccia can sometimes be lacking.
This Light Wheat Oatmeal Bread has cooked oatmeal porridge as part of the dough. The resulting loaf was the moistest, softest, and tenderest bread I’ve made in many years.
I could go on because there are hundreds of recipes on Breadtopia’s website. But here is one more, just to give you a sense of Melissa Johnson’s versatility and the diversity of options she has provided.
Rye and Buckwheat bread with Currants (and some golden raisins because I did not have enough currants.) Day after day the rye flavor grows in fruitiness and maltiness.
If you have read this far, here are a few more notes of worth about Melissa’s recipes. Her finished loaves are reasonably sized for small households, generally 1 to 1.5 pounds. While there is no doubt she has the experience to bake with the pros, her recipes are not overly technical. There are not strict admonitions about sticking to Desired Dough Temperatures and precision rise times. In this regard, her recipes, accompanied as they are now by videos and step-by-step photos, are intended for home bakers.