Peter Reinhart's Italian Bread

Today I made Italian Bread from Peter Reinhart's book "The Bread Baker's Apprentice".  I baked it on my pizza stone and it worked wonderfully.



This bread is made with a biga.  A biga is like a sourdough starter.  You make a yeast dough and let it ferment up to 3 days in the refrigerator or 3 months in the freezer and add this to the dough.  This extra fermentation adds a nice depth of flavour. 

Spring officially came a few days ago and the robins are here!  You cannot possibly see them in this tree, but they were singing their little hearts out this morning.  I am sure they were lamenting the snowfall!

And Miss Sugar loves my fur coat.  Can you tell which side is up?  And she has had her hair cut already!