I found this recipe a bit tricky to work with. There were no instructions given, just a chart of ingredients and their weights. I'm pretty okay with that most of the time. I know how to make bread. So I just mixed it by my preferred method, autolysing the flour, making the dough, and then working in the inclusions between the bulk ferment and the shaping.

My bread turned out okay in the end, but getting there was a bit hairy.

The dough started out incredibly stiff. But since others had complained of the dough getting too wet and sloppy once the fennel got mixed in, I figured this would be okay. I didn't bother soaking the raisins, but instead let them sit in the colander with the blanched fennel to soak up some of the extra moisture there. This seemed to work reasonably well, so I was feeling pretty good about my decisions up to this point. But then, my dough still got very wet and threatened to fall apart once I started mixing the inclusions in.

I ended up adding a 1/4 c. of gluten flour just to try to hold everything together. This seems to have worked out okay, but there was definitely a point when I thought I was just going to end up with an unfortunate wheat slurry.

I'm wondering if maybe next time I should try to work the fennel in from the get-go. Or perhaps just reduce the quantity of inclusions: 250g of inclusions is A LOT when you're not even using 400g of flour!

I'm not going to bother writing out instructions for this loaf since the person who posted it didn't provide any and my method didn't work so great. Feel free to experiment with your own breadmaking techniques. (And possibly tweak the recipe slightly.)

Fennel-Raisin-Pine Nut Sourdough

Slightly adapted from Sourdough Companion

Ingredients

• 80g hard (strong/high grade/bread) whole wheat flour
• 90g all-purpose flour
• 85g fine semolina flour
• 25g cornmeal
• 30g gluten (vital wheat) flour
• 122g water
• 165g fed (active/ripe) sourdough starter at 100% hydration
• 5g coarse sea salt
• 45g pine nuts
• 150g thinly sliced and chopped fresh fennel, blanched and drained
• 60g golden raisins