About two months ago, I decided I wanted to try baking bread.  I began perusing allrecipes.com, a site I have begun using quite extensively since I really began cooking a lot a half year ago.  I found a recipe for "Amish White Bread", and as it had good reviews, I decided to try it, just for a sandwhich bread.  It went very well, considering the fact that I hadn't really taken much time to learn about bread baking.  After the bread had undergone its first rise, I discovered that the outside of the risen dough was a little dry.  After it had proofed, the outside of the dough was again just a little dried out.  I formed the two loaves, popped them in the oven, and had to take them out about ten minutes prior to the end of the prescribed baking time. 

The two problems I encountered came from me allowing the dough to dry out, I believe.  The loaves both had an enormous crack along the side and top, and as I found out when cutting and eating, there was a little portion inside each loaf that was not quite done. 

Now, these didn't prove to be too big of problems, however.  My wife LOVED the bread, despite the very small vein of almost-baked dough.   As for the cracks, although they were more accidental and pronounced than the natural cracking that (often purposely) occurs from the oven spring, they weren't a big deal.

Needless to say, I was hooked, and had to learn more about this (then) mysterious process of baking.  So the next day I went to the local bookstore, bought their only book on bread baking (The Art of Baking), and checked out two books from the library (Daily Bread and Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads).  Within about a week I had read through all three, and here I am...baking away! :)

Hi

Im new to the forum and bread making, but I worked for a guy at the weekend making pizzas and he gave me the left over dough. He said feed it tonight and every few days with flour and sugar or honey and it'll survive as long as you want it, just break off bits when you want it.

So far its lasted a week and it seems fine (made pizza bases with it yesterday and they were lovely), but he didn't mention ammounts or anything else, just pretty much what i've written here. I am fascinated by this idea and want my dough to live as long as possible. So any advise or tips would be grateful. Also advise on what to look for if it dies?

Many thanks

Sam

Hi,

First of all let me tell you all that my username is supposed to be ironic :)

I have joined the forum because I can't bake.

I am a fairly decent cook and I continously change and adapt recipes.

I tried the same thing baking... Big Mistake...Huge!  But I guess you all already know that.

The first thing I learned this week is that Baking Powder and Yeast are NOT the same thing.  So for my first loaf of bread I got a raw piece of dough.  I went to bed a little frustrated with the effort but refused to throw away the dough.  Next morning i put said dough in the oven to finish baking.  Now as you may have guessed it was dry by then so I sprayed with water then threw it in the oven at 325 ( I figured low heat will thoroughly bake it right?)  Ok so to end my story I ended up with a loaf good enough to brake a window with.

Now I am sure that I'll be back here asking lots of questions and most will not be smart so Please have some patience.

Joe.

Hi All,

Thanks for all the help I have gotten browsing this site already.

I have been making bread by hand for about a year and decided to get some starter when I heard about Carl's 1847 Oregon Trail starter.

I revived it starting last weekend which seemed to go quite well even though it was colder than normal. After reading here about firm starters I decided to give it an extra feeding after dividing it in half. I now have 360 grams of 100% hydration and 240 grams of 50% in the refrigerator. I am hoping to make some sourdough bread this weekend. One problem I have is that many recipes don't specify the hydration of the starter (and are often in cups, instead of weights).

I am looking for a recipe for my first attempt at sourdough. I would like it to be a fairly simple recipe using white bread flour (that is what I have!) that would allow a schedule something like this:

• Thursday after work -- feed up starter (and modify hydration if necessary?)
• Friday afternoon/evening -- make sponge/pre-ferment
• Saturday -- finish and bake

If this is practical and anyone can point me to a recipe they would recommend, I would appreciate it very much. I do have Reinhart's "Crust and Crumb" (and hope to get his new one soon)

thanks in advance -- wayne

PS: I will be baking this on a boat so am limited to small gas oven or convection/microwave if that matters. I have tiles for the convection.

Today I made my first sourdough bread! The starter had been bubbling for almost 11 days now, so I decided to give it a try. At first it didn't rise much. I guess I simply didn't knead it properly in the beginning, but by the time it came out of the oven there was a queue waiting to take a bite out of it. I got the recipe from here.

Here's the loaf when it came out:

And this is the crumb:

My starter is slightly thicker than pancake-batter. Does anyone know any other good recipes that will work with a starter such as mine?

Thanks

Fence

There it is my very first loaf of bread, honey whole wheat. It went pretty well, I had my first sandwich today. Boy was it good, so much better then store bought. I'm making another loaf tonight...I just couldn't wait. I'm make a different version of the honey whole wheat. I'll let you know how it goes.

Because I had failed so many times to make a loaf of bread that I thought was worthy of serving to my friends and family I decided to reduce the size of my bread recipes to avoid wasting so many ingredients.  This loaf, the first I've ever made that I have any sense of pride in, is a "loaf for two" made with a scant 127 grams of flour, 89 grams water, 2.5 grams yeast, 2.5 grams salt, and an egg wash even got kudos from the LOML. 

It was a real confidence builder.

Thanks to those who encouraged me to continue trying.

I had my first real success today. I thank this site, obviously, for teaching me baker's percentage and how to use it.

I made a 70% hydration flour/yeast/salt/water bread today.  Everything was weighed and I came up with the following:

300g flour (100%)

210g water (70%)

6g active dry yeast (2%)

6g salt (2%)

This gave me a loaf that is 473 grams, or just over a pound, once baked. Perfect for a meal or two of pasta.

One thing I need to work on, though, is my scoring. I did score this one, but apparently it wasn't quite enough. The bottom blew out.  I think it also could've benefitted from a bit more proofing...maybe 15-20 minutes or so.

I'm going to weighing ingredients for breads now exclusively. The results are much easier to reproduce.

I'm trying to work out exactly how my starter will be added into this whole thing once I start feeding it by weight, which I'm going to start today. 20 grams of starter, 40 grams of water, 40 grams of flour, of which 5 grams will be rye.

Hello bakers.

I've been making my own bread now for about half a year. The italian bread over in the Favorite Recipes is probably the most difficult I've done. I have some other main stay recipes that I use for white/wheat loaves but what I really want to make is sourdough.

 So after checking my calendar and making sure I'm not traveling anywhere I started my starter.

The starter I'm using is a Amish friendship starter. May or may not be the best but I had all the ingredients at the house.

I began this yesterday and the recipe calls for me to mix 2c AP flour, 2c h20, 2.25tps yeast. and let it sit for 5 days uncovered. After reading many threads on the this forum I assume that is to capture more wild yeast.

This is my question, since it's flour and water mixed it has created a hard shell over the top. 

Does this shell get removed?  Do I smash it into the mixture on day 5 when I add more ingredients? 

This is from before I actually joined this site - actually this is the reason I joined this site.

Background:

In the States, I baked yeast bread. I had one recipe - from a craft, not a cookbook, so it used terms I was familiar with rather than the terms I more often find in baking recipes now that I'm looking around. It was a honey-whole wheat bread. I found all the ingredients in my local grocery store, used that recipe with no alterations except substituting applesauce for half the butter, and I baked it every Saturday, never with a problem.

Now, I live in rural China. I didn't bring the recipe with me. I don't have access to whole wheat. When I look at recipes, they confuse me. And yet my husband really misses bread. I am at a high altitude, but right now it's not dry at all, rather, close to 95% humidity most days. And, without air conditioning, heating, or well-sealed/insulated windows and walls, what it's like outside is a whole lot what it's like inside.

I found this recipe (I can't now for the life of me seem to find it anywhere!! I have it on a notecard) last week and tried it.

Oat-Nut Bread

830 ml flour
830 ml oats, ground to a flou
180 ml finely chopped walnuts
180 ml raisins
60 ml brown sugar
14 ml yeast (1/2 oz.; 14 grams)
10 ml salt
460 ml water
160 ml yogurt (I used vanilla unintentionally)
60 ml oil

1. Combine half the flour, all the oats, nuts, fruit, brown sugar, yeast, and salt.
2. In a saucepan heat water, yogurt, and oil over low heat, just until warm.
3. Add wet to dry ingredients, beating until smooth.
4. Add enough remaining flour for a soft dough.
5. Knead about 4 minutes, or until soft and elastic. Form to a ball.
6. Place on greased baking sheet, cover and let rest for 20 minutes or refrigerate overnight to bake in the morning (I did it overnight.)
7. Bake at 200C for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown.
8. Cool on a wire rack.

Unfortunently, this didn't work out for me so well. I did step 1, step 2, step 3. In step 4, I kep adding flour until I'd added way, way more than the recipe called for, and it still was a dough I could barely handle, it was so wet and sticky. I ran out of flour, and began adding oats, hoping to save it - I ground most of them but out of desperation began throwing them in there as whole rolled oats until I could finally knead the bread. Even then, it stuck to my hands, the cutting board, etc. In step 5, I formed it to more of a blob than a ball, since it was runny, and stuck it in a covered bowl in the fridge. In the morning, it was conformed to the shape of the bowl, so I dumped it on a baking sheet, stuck it in the oven, and let it bake.

The result was a very dense bread, tasty enough to eat mostly because of the raisins, but so dense I had to eat the whole thing (my husband didn't like it at all).

I tried the other loaf (this was supposed to make two) leaving it out all night after having frozen the dough (based on something I'd read online, somewhere). It came out just as dense, though it rose a bit in the oven whereas the first never did.

I'm munching on the second loaf now, hoping to get rid of it so I can bake something decent.

The only other note is that I won't be doing the walnuts again, even if I do come back to this recipe, because I couldn't taste nor feel them, and they cost the equivalent of $1.50 for so little!!

Any ideas, anyone, on what I can do better?