07/04/07

Thom Leonard French Country Bread

Its been a long 4 week wait for my kitchen cabinets to be completed. Its finally completed. What should have been a 2 week project took 2 weeks longer. In that interim, I brought out Maggie Glezer's book which had been neglected for a while and decided to make Thom Leonard's French country bread. 4 weeks of sweet enriched bread from neighborhood bakeries was starting to take a toll on me and left me craving for some simple hearth bread. The recipe called for high extraction flour but since the chance of finding such a flour here in Singapore is slim, I substituted with organic whole-wheat. It is a sourdough bread with 30% levain. I used Carl Griffith's starter for this bread.

I felt rusty when I handled the dough and some of my equipment was still lying in boxes in the living room. It'll probably be a couple of weeks more before I can settle in with my new cabinets.

3 loaves of Thom Leonard's French Country Bread fresh out of the oven.

They are still too hot for a crumb shot.