I think we produced our best yet today and we made it totally from scratch, no bread machine! Barbara did the kneading. We used ILoveCooking’s recipe but substituted wheat flour and added a cup of olives. The kneading was different than with white flour. It is much heavier and harder to manipulate. It’s tempting to add more water but I think we made it too wet doing that. We did the first proof in front of the fire place because the house was cold this morning. We shaped one oval and one round loaf. The boule we baked on a small round stone and the oval we baked in our new Emile Henry cloche at 450 degrees. The round took 40 minutes and I think we should have let it go 45. With the wheat bread and olives it took much longer to cook than plain white sourdough bread. We took it out when the center was about 197 degrees. I think we don’t want to pull at less than 200 degrees in the future. The cloched oval baked 25 minutes with the cover on and another 25 with it off (maybe a tad more). This brought it to around 203 degrees when we pulled it.

Next we’ll try a half wheat, half white olive with some sugar. Jarad uses 2 tbsp sugar and 1 tsp salt for a smaller batch. I suppose we could do 3 tbsp of sugar and 1/2 tbsp of salt to stick with his compromise with 2 tsp sugar and 1 tbsp salt. We also want to find a recipe for cheesy jalapeno bread and there’s a recipe for cinnamon rolls in the Zojirushi cookbook we want to try too.