I wanted to share my first loaf of real sourdough with the people who inspired it. I've been baking a long time, off and on, but we retired a while ago and moved to very rural Tennessee, and I really miss the variety of bread it was easy to find in Southern California. This is all the more reason to bake my own.

I read Floyd's lesson "When Yeasts Attack", and made my starter using the method he describes there. I had good luck with it from the start, and I continued to nourish it for a week, and then made the dough yesterday, put it into the frig to rise overnight, returned it to room temperature, and baked it this morning. I need a lot of work on shaping loaves, and slashing, but I'm very pleased with this loaf anyway, and would like to think of it as a beginning.

Please be gentle and think "Rustic" when you view the photos.

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? 

Hi all, I baked my first loaf last night and while am I quite proud that after eating it, I have yet to go to the hospital, I am a bit worried about the taste (or lack there of) and its density.

I used the following recipe:

Poolish:

1 - cup flour (non-bleached, non-bromated)

1 - cup water

1 - Tbsp. honey

1/4 - tsp. active dry yeast

I proofed the yeast in the honey water and added it to the flour, a quick mix and I let it sit in a metal contaner covered in plastic wrap for about 24 hours.

Rest of the loaf:

This loaf of hearth bread from The Bread Bible was one of my first efforts. I made it to serve with the pork shoulder I slow smoked for 18 hours. When I first started baking, I always used a loaf pan because I didn't have the confidence to try shaping the loaf myself. Since then I have stopped using the loaf pans for this type of bread and I'll be adding more photos soon to show the free-form loaves.

And so it begins and I am hooked! Several months ago I was taking a course in Microbiology (don't ask, it'd take too long to explain), and we were studying yeasts. As I have gout, I can't drink, so making beer was out. That left bread. I bought a sack of King Arthur Bread Flour, and on the back was a recipe for their Oatmeal Toasting Bread. I made it. And made it again. And again. And again.

Well, maybe it didn't turn out so bad after all. Although the crust is very hard and it didn't rise as much as I had hoped.

I never thought I'd see the day when I would get excited about a lump of dough. I just finished kneading a basic recipe and now I have to wait a very long 90 minutes for it to rise before kneading it again. It's very warm and humid here today so I wonder if that will affect the rising time. Any thoughts?

I have never baked a loaf of bread in my life. I am 53 years old. My mom still makes delicious Irish soda bread. But it is my brother who lives in Costa Rica that has inspired me to finally bake some bread. I am the type of person who would never be satisfied just baking a loaf of plain white bread every weekend. I tend to max out everything I do (I started running a few years ago to get in shape and lost 42 pounds inside of 6 months). Then I started drinking beer and stopped running only to find that the 42 pounds came back with a vengeance. DUH!