The Main Squeeze spotted this recipe on the same page as the Saffron Couscous, Chickpea and Lentil Salad she was making, ripped out of The Guardian Weekend magazine for 19 September 2009. It looked good. And it contained something I've never seen before in a bread recipe: a kind of roux, flour boile...

Having touched on some global stuff, it occurred to me to bring the topic back home, by making good on my promise to write more about the bread-making course I went on a month or so ago.

The course was definitely firmly rooted in an artisanal tradition. But it was unlike the artisanal bread site...

I read a nice piece by Madronna Holden on her blog Our Earth/Ourselves. She tackles the larger theme of the story of consumer products, reminding readers of Wendell Berry's remark that we should not eat any food we are not willing to pray over.

Well, that's me starving to death right there, because I pray to nothing over nothing.

Much of the bread you can buy in shops in Italy remains remarkably good. Some things, though, aren't available, at least not nearby. One of those is rye bread. So I resolved to make some this weekend, using a recipe for Heidelberg Rye from the 1973 edition of Bernard Clayton Jr's The Complete Book of Breads.

Conclusion: A fine loaf, but I do need to internalise that stuff about watching the loaf not the clock. If I can do it while the bread is in the oven, why not while it is rising?

First off, 2000 words.

The complete story. With all the great help I've had at The Fresh Loaf, I managed a pretty good hot weather sourdough loaf last time. My notes then suggested giving the shaped loaves longer at room temperature and scoring more resolutely, and so at the first possible o...