Back in business - Cretan Bread

I'm back after some time visiting the boyfriend's family in Seville. Seville is too beautiful for words, but also hotter than the surface of the sun, so being welcomed back to London by a wall of rain was very refreshing.
We ate everything, from tripe to caracoles, and everything was delicious and cheap. I definitely need to stop spending 3/4 of my salary on food, so more home made everything.
Perversely getting a breadmaker for Christmas has made me more interested in learning how to make bread from scratch. It's not necessarily more economical to do this, but there's something very calming about kneading bread and waiting for it to rise (and it cleans up the fingernails a treat).

This recipe is from Cretan Cooking, which looks like one of those awful recipe books that you buy on holiday at the airport, but unlike usual tourist fodder there is a lot of useful information here.
Cretan bread uses leven (like a fortified yeast) as a raising agent, but because I'm not organised enough to start something 12 hours before I know I want to do it I used yeast and some of my awesome sourdough starter. The recipe also calls for mastic, which I didn't have, and mahlep seeds which I did. Their presence in my cupboard is a testament to how much of an impulse buyer the bf is. We live in a Greek/ Turkish part of London and on a whim he decided to bring these back to me from a local deli - not knowing what they were. Exciting stuff, every day's a really mild adventure around here...

The recipe doesn't tell you how long to prove the dough for or what temperature to bake it at, which is either annoying and unhelpful or empowering. Whatevs. I think the suggestion is that this recipe is robust enough to  adapt to variations.
Chewy and slightly sweet. Not an every day bread, but amazing as toast for breakfast.