Leaves from a Baker's Notebook

Today saw the re-staging of the classic struggle of Woman Versus Pizza Crust Dough. Woman emerged triumphant, though at the cost of some sore arms. I need to add a little more water to the dough, as rolling it out is hard, too hard. It's difficult to judge how much is correct amount though. With regular bread dough I can just feel the dough in the mixer and know when it's right, but the pizza crust dough gets a 24 hour rest in the cooler and that changes everything. I seem to have arrived at a taste everyone likes, so at least I can leave that part alone.

I also made a second batch of Flax Bread #1 today. It's FB#1 because Flax Bread is a new bread I'm developing, and this is the first iteration of the test cycle, and I wanted a name that would signal the customers that there will be different versions of Flax Bread to come. I'm looking forward to playing around with this--I haven't been able to work on a new bread recipe in ages. (Pizza crust doesn't count. Don't ask why, it just doesn't.) I don't expect to make anything too fancy out of it, though. Good bread doesn't need bells and whistles, and I'm not interested in making anything other than good bread.