After having successfully fed my starter from Zingermans last week, turned it into a chef and then a levain, I was finally able to start crafting my own Farm Loaf using Zingerman's Bakehouse recipe last night!

I started the bread last night by prepping the levain and letting it set for 12 hours. In the morning I started the mixing and crafting, mixing in bowl till combined...kneading for 12 minutes and so on. After letting it set for 3 hours with two stretch and folds...I proceeded to let it ferment again for 3 and a half hours more. One thing I've learned so far from Zingermans it all their recipes seem to take time...lots.

I preshaped the loaf around 2 o'clock, placed it in my banneton and by five o'clock, it was ready to bake! 18 hours of overall time it took for this bread, but from all the farm loaves I've tasted, it is worth it.

If this bread wasn't still so freshly baked, I would have pictures of the crumb, but I've learned to wait before slicing bread : )

Next week I will be attempting the Vermont Sourdough by Hamelman one more time since my last few attempts haven't been that great. Hopefully with my newly acquired knowledge I will be able to craft a nicer loaf though.

Also baked for the first time ever, Palmiers today!Turned out to be a bit 'overdone', but they still tasted yummy!

Hello everyone. I'm new to the site. I found it a couple of weeks ago and was immediately astounded by the quality of the breads and the advice that was here. I've been baking bread for around 7 years. I started with a castoff bread machine, graduated to pan breads and then one day about six years ago I was eating a piece of store-bought sourdough and thought "I wonder how hard it would be to make this." I ordered a sourdough starter from Sourdoughs International in Idaho and it's been percolating along ever since then. I tried Carl Griffith's starter and even made my own, but I kept coming back to the San Francisco starter I purchased from Ed Wood's company. I spent a lot of time on the rec.food.sourdough newsgroups and subscribed to Mike Avery's mailing list before I found this site. I've made a lot of bread in the intervening years, most of it good-flavored but mostly uninteresting pan breads. Don't get me wrong, my kids don't eat store bought cardbread unless we're really in a pinch and I haven't been able to bake in a while. My standard daily bread for the past few years has been good, just not great. My baking road has been long and bumpy, and several times I almost gave up altogether. Finally, a few weeks ago I caught the bug again and I'm proud to say that everything seems to be coming together this time.

For a long time I was really nervous about degassing my sourdough. Somehow I had it stuck in my head that a sourdough starter just couldn't produce the kind of oomph a yeasted loaf could, so I resisted handling the dough very much, mixing it until the gluten developed and then letting it sit until risen. A few weeks ago I stumbled across a method on Mike Avery's website to let the dough do all (well, most) of the work in developing the gluten. He mixes the final dough together until it's a very rough mass, then lets it rest for a couple of hours, stretching and folding the dough two or three times during the rise. I know I've read similar techniques elsewhere, but for some reason his explanation stuck with me. I decided to give it a try and immediately noticed a huge improvement. The other things that have greatly helped in recent weeks are the addition of split firebrick as my baking surface and the purchase of the SuperPeel from Exo Products.

I've always baked primarily for myself, but if my family and friends didn't enjoy the fruits of my labors, I'm sure I wouldn't be nearly as motivated to continue and improve. In the past couple of weeks, I've received three compliments (unsolicited, of course) that have each made my day. A coworker said "This is just like something you'd get at a bakery." A lady at a neighborhood party said "I pay good money for bread like this," and this morning I presented my wife with the best looking baguette I've ever produced and she responded with "I've had baguettes in France that weren't this good."

I obviously still have a lot to learn, but there's just something about finally reaching a goal that has taken so long to achieve that makes me want to shout about it from the rooftops. All day long I've felt like a kid at Christmas, and I keep sneaking downstairs to cut another slice. It's amazing that something so fundamentally simple can be so universally fulfilling. I feel like today's batch of bread was finally good enough to photograph and post for all of you to see. Any comments, suggestions, or questions are welcome. Happy baking!

I have been working with the Cook's Magazine "Almost No Knead" recipe, which seems pretty slick to me. Trouble is, after baking the recipe a number of times, I feel there is an either/or issue resolving hydration vs rise and shape stability. I do my second rise on a parchment sheet lowered into a bowl (boule?) shaped like the rounded loaf I hope for. When the second rise is complete, I remove the parchment sling, slash the loaf, then lower it into the 6 quart dutch oven for baking. The loaf is about an inch less in diameter than the pot.

Now for the tragic outcome: The loaf subsides into something like a very thick Frisbee. It springs pretty well and the interior is uniformly holey. Tastes great. But.... I'd like a nice upstanding loaf that is a good deal rounder. I don't want a basketball, but should I reduce the hydration to make a stiffer dough? Is there just something inherent in the no knead regieme that makes a more slack dough? Anyone have strategies for "stiffening the spine" of my boules without giving up their nice moist chewiness?

Thanks for your ideas.

Pain de campagne from Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. This is my first attempt at a loaf from this book, as well as my first post.

i did my first recipe from peter reinharts whole grain bread book and i'm very pleased with it. this is the most oven spring i've gotten on a free form bread to date.  i am not allowing anyone to cut into it until completely cool....this could take a while.

Hey TFLies,

My wife is a HUGE fan of the cannonball, and with my recent success in sourdough bread, she's requesting that I try my hand at them.  For those who may not know what a cannonball is (not the heavy metal projectiles), a cannonball (CB) is a small sourdough boule that has been hallowed out and had soup poured into it.

Now, I've never made CB boules before, so I'm looking for some pointers before I try to tackle this project.  I'm pretty sure a 6" boule/roll would do the trick, but without physically having a CB in front of me to measure, I can't be sure.  Further, I'm pretty sure the boule's used for CBs are much more spherical than many of the boule's I've made in the past, so there may be something there I'll need to do in order to make a very high dome.

 Again, any help from somebody who has produced CB boules would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Taco

Sourdough boules pic 1 

Sourdough boules pic 2

OK, I'm new to uploading images, so if I didn't do this right, somebody please let me know the right way to get one's images into a post.

I had been contributing to the responses to Somegeek's 'My First Loaves (pics)' forum thread and watching Hans bake amazing loaves and I figured it was time to stop writing and do some baking.

These are sourdough boules made using Jeffrey Hamelman's 'Vermont Sourdough' recipe in his wonderful book 'Bread' as a guide. My sourdough starter is around 7 weeks old by now. I bulk fermented the dough for around 3 1/2 hours, folding 2 times during this phase. Then I shaped the loaves and let them proof in bannetons for an hour before retarding in the fridge for 12 hours. After taking them out I let the loaves warm up for 2 hours while I preheated the oven to 465 degrees. Then I removed them from the bannetons, slashed (not so well), and baked, using a steam pan on the bottom rack and a spritzer bottle a couple of times in the first 3 or 4 minutes. After 10 minutes I turned the loaves and removed the steam-pan, turning the oven down to 440 and baking another 22 minutes.

The loaves have a lovely airy crumb, which I will take a picture of, and a nice crunchy crust. The crust is a deep dark brown, maybe a little darker than I expected, especially toward the bottom, and the internal temperature was 205 degrees (or more). There are some light and tantalizing sour notes, but I thought with the 12 hour retarding it would have gained a more full sour taste. I was reading Maggie Glezer's 'Artisan Baking' book, where she says that the temperature for developing the acetic lactobacillus is around 68 degrees, which got me thinking. My kitchen was around 75 degrees last night. Has anyone tried bulk fermentation of sourdough where the dough is retarded for just, say, a half hour at a time, alternating with longer stretches at room temperature? I ask because doing so would get several periods during which the dough would be at Glezer's optimal temp for developing the sour in the sourdough.

I'm not new to baking bread, but I am to baking sourdough. As all you experienced sourdough bakers already know, there is something magical about making great-tasting bread without commercial yeast. I felt that thrill this time!

Soundman (David)

This is my second bread from BBA.  I decided to stick with boules even though Reinhart says this is the perfect dough for all kinds of fancy shapes.  Everything went really well until the slashing.  I bought a lame from a local kitchen store and it just was not slashing the dough.  At all!  I tried wetting it, oiling it, using the other side of the blade... nada.  Finally I touched it with the tip of my finger and realized that it's fairly dull.  Sad!

I grabbed a semi-sharp serrated tomato knife to do the slashing instead.  While that actually cut into the dough, it did so with a fair amount of drag, so I didn't get the cleanest slashes.  Ah well.  Time to go to the hardware store to buy a package of razor blades, I guess. 

The recipe said it made three loaves.  They turned out to be rather small loaves, so next time I think I'll split it into two if I'm going to do the same shape.  But there is something nice about these little boules, though.

The crumb on this is decent.  The taste is good, but I think I like the taste of the pain de l'ancienne better.  My husband liked the taste of this, but halfway through a big slice said there was an "aftertaste."  I don't know if he's tasting the whole wheat component (hard red winter wheat berries I ground in my vitamix) or what.  I don't think I let the bread overproof, and he said it wasn't an alcohol flavor, so I'm not sure what he's tasting.

Overall a fairly successful bake.  It was my first time using a pate fermente.  I even considered making two loaves and keeping the other third of the dough for a loaf tomorrow, but I haven't baked with a poolish yet so that might be my next project. 

I got my copy of the BBA about two weeks ago, and it's been really great, I read through it in just two days and have started trying out various recipes and techniques, Here are some pics of the results, I have been very very happy with them all so far, and below are actually shots of my first attempts at each recipe :)

- Here is a Boule and a Tabatiere made with the Pain de Campagne recipe

- Here is an Epi and Fougasse with the same recipe (Same dough too actually)

- Here is the crumb from the Epi, it was crispy and delicious

- and a crumb shot of the Tabatiere, it was soft and very springy, the crust was excellent

- and finally some Pain a l'Ancienne from last week, it was excellent though my oven was being a little wonky at the time, so it's not as good as it could have been, (And will be next week ;) )

 
Walnut-Raisin Bread

Walnut-Raisin Crumb with butter

I started this loaf after seeing Susan from San Diego's bread at the SD meeting last weekend. The images were so delicious looking I knew my wife would love it. I don't make a lot of breads with things added inside but I could almost smell this one. I might of proofed this a little longer for a more open crumb but it chews great and tastes wonderful.

Who ever said "It is not you for which he wags his tail but for your bread" was right on. My wife's constant companion jumped up and voted with his teeth that he liked this batch, just as I was taking the picture. What a great dog!

Here is my adaptation of Susan from SD's recipe.

Walnut Raisin Bread

 500g flour (in this one I put about a half-cup of WW, the rest is Harvest King), 350g water, ~100g starter, ¼ tsp IDY10g salt 2 T sugar or honey,(and I added about 1-cup of very lightly toasted chopped walnuts and 1 cup of raisins.  (I soaked them for a few minutes in hot water) Mix, rest 5-10 minutes, machine knead/mix to windowpane, rest 10 minutes, a couple folds, fold (here's where I added the walnuts and raisins), pre-shape and  ferment  in an oiled bowl for 1.5 Hours.  Turn out onto parchment, cover and proof for 30 minutes. Slash, then lower into the hot Le Cloche at 470F, cover, lower heat to 450F, bake for 15 minutes, remove top and, bake until dark brown and internal temp is 200F. For me that was 30 minutes plus and additional  8 minutes at 400F.  I'm using Reinhart's suggestion to refresh my starter:  1:3:4 (for me 15g:38g:60g), and that has made a difference.
I only used 1/4 tsp IDY because my starter is strong. You may give that consideration but it was perfect for me.