Hi from Amsterdam

Hi everyone,

My name is Elmer and living in Amsterdam. I'm into baking bread for some 15 years now. It started when I lived in New Zealand for a while. The quality of the bread over there was so horrifying that the people I lived with baked their own bread. They taught me their recipe, a very basic no-kneading yeast bread with 86% hydration and overnight (at roomtemp) proofing. Yet it tasted nice and it has been my daily bread for quite a while. A couple of years later I switch to sourdough, but apart from that the bread stayed the same. Again, a couple of years later I attended a sourdough bread workshop. That changed my life. Since then, I have been baking like crazy and by now I bake all the bread for the community I live in (about 500kg/year).

I have a little blog where I (try) to put my recipes and experiments on: https://elmerstickel.org/

Pretty much all of my bread I bake with local organic wheat. This is quite different from French, German or American wheat. The Netherlands is a rather cold, windy and wet county and that comes at a price when it regards wheat... Some bakers say it is impossible to bake with Dutch wheat, but I disagree!

So why am I here at the Fresh Loaf? First of all, I just enjoy seeing what other people baked. I also like to discuss certain techniques and recipes. And sometimes I could use some advice too!

 Here's an example of one my breads, a buckwheat sourdough bread. The recipe you can find here.