Floydm's blog

Today's batch of Pain Sur Poolish turned out pretty good. Not as good as last time, I don't think. We left the house during primary fermentation, so I threw it into the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm not sure I let the dough warm back up enough afterward. Also, the dough was definitely drier than last time. The wetness of the dough last time was part of what I think contributed to it being so good. So, more work to be done before I've got this one down.

So, I don't forget, the recipe I used was roughly the Village Baker recipe:

3/4 teaspoon instant yeast
1/2 cup water
the poolish that had sat out overnight (1 cup water, 1 cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon yeast)
2 cups flour (1 bread, 1 all-purpose)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Combine, let ferment 2 hours, punch down, let rise another 45, shape into logs, let rest 15 minutes, stretch, let rise another 1 to 1 1/2 hours, bake.

I just started a poolish for pain poolish again tomorrow.

1 cup bread flour
1 cup cool water
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast

Overnight at room temperature seems to be about right. When I come down in the morning it is fairly foamy but doesn't appear to have totally run out of steam yet.

Oh yeah, I think I Terry Schiavo'ed my starter. I stopped feeding it two or three weekends ago, the weekend everyone in the house got sick. I probably could nurse it back to life, but I think I'm going to let it go. There are too many other breads I want to try baking right now: having to come up with something that involved my starter every weekend was getting to be a burden. Easy come, easy go.

of the pain poolish was excellent too. It wasn't as pretty, but it still tasted great.

This weekend I made bagels, pain au raisin, cream cheese snails, and pain poolish.

Bagels and snails were pretty easy. I'll post the snails recipe soon. The bagel recipe is here.

We ate one of the two pain poolish loaves last night. It was excellent. It'll be interesting to compare the other one to it tonight: I was pretty rough shaping the one we ate last night. It came out a beautiful dark brown. The other loaf I did not work as hard while shaping. It came out pretty pale. I suspect that that one may have been a little "over the hill" and would have benefited from being worked harder.

Once I get the pain poolish down I will post a recipe too.