March edition of the Mellow Bakers

And here they are: the breads of this month Mellow Bakers challenge. Some of them I've baked a while back, the first one even as long back as 2006. As this book "Bread" by Jeffrey Hamelman is one of the first books on bread I bought. In the meantime many, many books followed. Still this stays one of the favorite books, that every home baker should have. It made me overcome my fear of baking with sourdough and introduced me to soakers.

Sunflower seed bread with rye sourdough. A lovely bread, just love the taste of those toasted sunflower in the dough. I added sunflower seeds on top too make it even more seedy. Don't pre-toast the seeds you put on the top, cause they'll get toasted in the oven while baking.

This Whole-Wheat Multigrain is a bread that uses a soaker, which is another thing I learned from this book and I've used that many times up til now, as you can see this bread was baked in 2006 also. I made a note in the book, that when you add the salt in the soaker, you make a note of that, so you won't add salt again when making the final dough.

The Whole-Wheat Levain is hardly a real whole wheat bread as it's 50% whole wheat and 50% white flour. But especially in American baking books they tend to name these kind of breads whole wheat very quick. In the Netherlands a whole wheat bread is made only with whole wheat flour. But a lovely bread regardless the name. (we'd call this mixed flour bread a "brown" bread). I added a pinch of yeast, to help the bread rise, as I'm always doubting my starters ánd to mellow the sour taste.

Finally the Aloo Paratha.Can't help but loving the name first of all, I wasn't really sure of how much filling to put in. In retrospect I'm sure I used way too little. We ate them with soup and they were very nice, but we all wanted more filling... so that's for next time I guess.

And that's the Mellow Bakers for this month. Bring on April!