I haven’t finished a lot of books lately.  Started a few, but instead of reading to the end, I have been baking.  Somehow, summertime is great for dinner sandwiches, bread and salads, and just plain warm bread dipped in olive oil.  To get a sense of what a five-plus pounder looks like, compare this loaf to the full-size dinner plate in the upper left.

They say great bakers make a thousand baguettes before they get them right.  I’m getting closer.  I got the shape, length, and slashes right on these three.  The crumb should be a riot of different size holes as gases inside the dough explode and stretch gluten in every possible direction inside the super hot oven.  My crumb was better than usual, but not yet something that’s photo worthy.  Also these are a little pale.  Tasty though.

We started with a two-day-old, no-knead light rye bread baked with millet and oat groats.  After painting each slice with olive oil, we toasted them on the grill.  Then we schmeared each toast with a compound butter with chopped, spring garlic scapes, minced chives, and grated parmesan following the recipe set by Melissa Clark in the New York Times.  We ate so many we almost couldn’t eat dinner.

I need to work on my consistency.  Some of my slashes expanded perfectly and others, meh. These were interesting loaves on a couple of accounts.  The buckwheat gave the breads a bluish tint.  Also, I used Saudi Arabia starter.  Usually Saudi Arabia doesn’t make light breads, but these were great.  In contrast, a pair of full-length baguettes I made with my Meadville starter on the same day turned out too pasty-tasting to even post a picture.  Isaac had to turn those into bruschetta.  So much to learn.

There is no surer sign of summer at my house than grilled sourdough breads.  I use my Saudi Arabian sourdough, pat flat 15 – 20 rounds, paint one side with olive oil and slap down the breads to fry over a hot charcoal grill.  Once they’ve bubbled on top, the tops are oiled, or as Leah puts it, the tops are covered in oil paint, and they are flipped.  Best if ripped into pieces and eaten while they are still steaming but in this case we saved most to have wrapped around grilled lamb shashlik.  For the record, leaning against the bowl of grilled breads is a sourdough ciabatta, the prettier of the two I made.  The less pretty, but tastier one, was full of gently toasted red onion and wild ramps.

I know it’s Pesach so no I did not make this bread this weekend.  Made these two a couple of weeks ago: oats, flax, whole grain barley, flour, and whole wheat flour.  Took one loaf to a department meeting and watched it disappear like it was being filmed with a time-lapse camera.

A pair of raisin walnut loaves made with whole wheat starter.  Dense and chewy, not too heavy, sweet from the raisins, salty from the dough.  It was still making great toast a week later.

And some granola with grated organic apples from our winter CSA. Not really a sourdough or a SCOBY, I know, but just as warm and delicious.

You know how on Friday night you look forward to sleeping in until the hour hand on the clock contains double digits but get up at the usual time anyway out of habit?  Sure enough I was awake by 6 AM, but at least had a productive morning  Before 11 AM I had completed the following.

From left to right: Seven half pints of green-tea kombucha re-fermenting with grated ginger and wedges of lime; two batards of rye; a fermenting starter (wait for it) in the metal bowl; and a dozen chocolate cranberry muffins.

The muffins, in addition to the cocoa and cranberries, were filled with walnuts and were made with my usual blend of found dry ingredients (soy flour, buckwheat, whole flaxseed meal) and wet (mashed banana, okara, also known as the soybean mash leftover from my soymilk maker, honey, and two eggs from my friend the chicken farmer).  Perfect weekend breakfast.

Not a great photo, perhaps, but this miche tasted as good as it looked.  The crust was crackly and the interior was warm, sour, almost solid in its richness, but still full of irregular crumb big holes and that we bakers are always aiming for.  I brought this bread to a dinner party we attended.  A perfect complement on an icy winter night to the stuffed cabbage, pickled beets, edamame hummus, green salad, and red wine.  For dessert, Sue made Melissa Clark’s lemon bars with olive oil and sea salt that was so good it stunned the group into silence.

I continue to struggle to find recipes that use my whole wheat starter to its full advantage.  My whole wheat starter just doesn’t have as much rising power as either of my white starters no matter how much white flour I add to the recipe.  This dough was very wet to begin with, but cooked up beautifully.

The crust was crisp but still thin.  The interior was moist and chewy and unlike most of my raisin walnut breads, the inclusions were evenly distributed.  The proportions were generous, but not overwhelming.  Just waiting to be toasted and buttered.

Sue’s brother Marty was here for a week of superior cooking.  Marty is an exceptional chef and my job when he’s around is to eat whatever he puts in front of me, to happily clean up after him, and to make breads to accompany his mains.

To celebrate his arrival and the ninety-ninth anniversary of the birth of their Dad, I baked a Danish sourdough rye.  It’s a dense, sour loaf full of boiled grains of rye, wheat, and farro (an ancient variety of wheat) berries, plus some sunflower seeds and flax seeds.  I made this with my Cripple Creek whole wheat starter.

Next, for the second year running, Marty and I made croissant.  Croissant preparation is hard work.  It takes three days, most of that devoted to turning flour and butter into puff pastry and to do that cold butter is beaten and then rolled into dough.  Then the dough is cooled, rolled flat, folded and cooled again.  Repeat three times before rolling the croissant, which are required to rest in the fridge overnight.  Honestly, this year’s were not as good as the batch we prepared last year.  This year’s were missing crispiness on the outside and the inside were too breadlike.  We fear we might have let the croissant get too warm in the very last step allowing the butter to melt into the flour.  Next year we’ll try again.

Rising.

Ready for the oven.

The croissant were made from my Meadville starter and I couldn’t bear to throw it away so I turned the leftover into a rye starter.  Actually, I turned it into a fried onion, rye starter and cooked it all into a New York style deli rye.  This might have been my favorite of the week.  It really did taste like New York deli onion rye.

No winter visit by Marty would be complete without his specialty lox flown in and delivered by an unaware and overworked UPS man.  For years we ate the lox on blini purchased over the internet.  Two years ago Marty and I concluded that authentic Russian blini, buckwheat pancakes, really, were probably made with a sourdough starter rather than with yeast.  This year we made our blini with 100% buckwheat flour and again used my starter from Saudi Arabia.  The blini were very sour and intensely grainy.  Next year we’ll go back to a fifty – fifty mixture of white flour and buckwheat so we don’t overpower the balance of creme fraiche (homemade, of course), red onion, capers, and lox.  Not that we are complaining.

Next year.  Bagels!