Back from vacation, back to bread

I just returned from being out of town/country/continent nearly three weeks. Fortunately, I had 4 days to rest, recover, and get back on Pacific time.

The first thing I did upon getting back, late Wednesday night, was to take my two sourdough starters out of the refrigerator and refresh them. Then Friday morning I made some cinnamon-cherry bread in my Zojirushi. Saturday morning I made sourdough.

The cinnamon-cherry bread was based on Zojirushi's 1.5# 100% whole wheat apple bread recipe, but with the following changes:

• instead of 1/2 c of dried apple, I used 3/4+ c of chopped dried sour cherries (from Berkeley Bowl)
• instead of regular sugar, I used raw sugar
• instead of molasses (which I couldn't find in the house), I used a strong honey
• I increased the cinnamon about 50%
• I reduced the salt and yeast 50%

The resulting bread was very good, either fresh or toasted. I just had some toasted, with butter, and that was delicious.

On to the sourdough. Both starters woke up after their 25+ day rest, with no problems.

Saturday morning I started making the usual Josey Baker sourdough loaf. The kitchen was warm, so everything progressed much more quickly than the times listed in the book.

I slashed twice,
but not deeply enough or at a big enough angle,
so the top cracked a bit between the slashes.

The result was good, as usual.

I put our biggest stock pot on top for the first 20 minutes,
but it was a little too small, so one end was a bit misshapen.

I went for a bold bake, which resulted in a nice crust and still moist interior. I think I might back off a little bit next time, though, since some parts of the crust tasted almost burnt.