Adventures in bread making

As a Christmas/New Year/Just Because present, I got myself (and M) a few new cookbooks. One is a massive tome of Indian recipes, to inspire us to try things well outside of our comfort zones; two are Michael Ruhlman's books Ratio (for me) and Twenty (for M). I wanted M to get a chance to explore technique in a language and style that appealed to him, and I was interested in learning how to break away from being so recipe-bound. What I did not expect was that my first "ratiometric" cooking would be bread.

Ruhlman's bread ratio breaks down like this:
500g flour
300g water
10g salt
2g yeast

We've settled on the following as an everyday adaptation:
500g flour
300g water
10g salt
10g olive oil
4g yeast (ours is old and gets started very slowly)

This variation got cut up into 2" pieces after the first rise, coated in melted butter and cinnamon sugar, and turned into pull apart bread:
500g flour (plus a little extra in kneading)
300g milk (scalded first)
10g salt
2 Tbsp melted butter
8g yeast

We've baked the basic bread in a dutch oven (above), and in a loaf pan (below). It tastes a lot better than store bought bread, and makes the best cinnamon toast french toast casserole. (From smittenkitchen, of course.) Yum.