I think the one thing that has driven me to trying to bake my own bread is calories. Look at it this way: bread is on the "caution" list at the very least, or maybe even the "forbidden" list, calorie-wise. (OH-MY-GOD it's CARBS! It's CALORIES!) But I do love bread, have enjoyed my buttered toast in the morning (a long lost dream) and my mayonnaise-filled tuna or chicken salad sandwiches, or BLTs. . . . it's been a while.

So here's the thing. If you decide that you're going to eat bread it's got to be PERFECT, right? It's got to be WORTH IT, worth all those calories and carbs. So my absolute favorite bread is a thin-chewy-crusted sourdough -- really sour, you understand? -- with an intense sour taste and magnificent open "crumb. . . ." (I know I should know what that means, but "crumb" was never in my vocabulary until I hit this site. It seems like it's the body of the bread, maybe.)

And I made my own sourdough starter, then appealed to folks on various lists and got starter recipes to try, and even got a chunk of San Francisco starter to add to my own growing community of fermenting combinations. . . By golly the thing is alive, it bubbles and perks and smells heavenly. . .

Okay. Loaf number 1 was square and tasted square. (Bread machine loaf.) Loaf number 2 was kneaded in the bread machine and 2nd rise out of the machine and baked in the oven: flat and dense. I had to throw it away. Loaf number 3 same start, but just a bit higher in the baking. Not worth the calories. Loaf 4 I thought holy cow I might be able to do this. . . and I ate the whole thing. OHMYGOD! CARBS & CALORIES. (Well, it did take me a week to consume it, worth every calorie in taste, if not in texture -- still too dense.)

So this weekend I'm stepping back, knowing that I've got this magnificent starter in the fridge, poised for excellence. My process has been to get it out of the fridge on Thursday night, feed it Thursday pm, Friday am and pm, then start working on things Saturday and . . . CREATING INCFREDIBLY YUMMY CARBS AND CALORIES. . . so there it sits and NOW what do I do. Ignore it?? I can't.

What do you other "breadies" do about eating what you make?????????????

Glad to be here, love the posts and yearn for the perfection I've seen here . . . would just love to NOT have it settle on my hips!

Peggy Bjarno

Physics 1021
Bread is Dangerous

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates  were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations
4. More than 90 percent of violent crimes are committed within 24 hours of eating bread.
5. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average North American eats more bread than that in one month!
6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis.
7. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days.
8. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts.
9. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.
10. Newborn babies can choke on bread.
11. Bread is baked at temperatures as high as 240 degrees Celsius! That kind of heat can kill an adult in less than one minute.
12. Most bread eaters are utterly unable to distinguish between significant scientific fact and meaningless statistical babbling.

In light of these frightening statistics, we propose the following bread restrictions:

1. No sale of bread to minors
2. A nationwide "Just Say No To Toast" campaign, complete celebrity TV spots and bumper stickers.
3. A 300 percent federal tax on all bread to pay for all the societal ills we might associate with bread.
4. No animal or human images, nor any primary colors (which may appeal to children) may be used to promote bread usage.
5. The establishment of "Bread-free" zones around schools.

http://www.physics.uwo.ca/ugrad/p021/course_information/bread.html

I just viewed a video of Julia Child making Tarte Tatin. This was a 1971 broadcast of The French Chef TV program.

Now, Tarte Tatin is a favorite of mine, but my reason for pointing you all to this video is Julia's performance. I won't say more. Just see for yourself.

Enjoy!

David

this is my first try,it is very easy to bake.I get the recipe from the web.

pretzel recipe is refer to:

http://www.grouprecipes.com/892/pretzel.html

I live in northwest Arkansas and we were hit last week with an ice storm that knocked out the electricity for around 200,000 people- me included. My power was off from Tuesday morning until Saturday night and, as the strong independent (hard-headed) woman that I am, I elected to stay in my home with my cat and try to ride it out until the electricity was restored. Thank goodness I have a gas grill with a side burner and had an almost-full tank of propane. I was able to make bread, apple crisp, grill steaks, make brats cooked in beer with caralmelized onions and German potato salad- well, you get the point- nothing stopped me from my passion of COOKING. The bread-baking was a little dicey, and I was beginning to have withdrawals from the house filled with the smell of bread baking when the power finally came back on. I was reared in the country on a farm where we made-do with what we had. My mom's house was drafty and the bedrooms were never heated, so my mom took large rocks and sat them in front of the stove to warm, wrapped them in newspapers, and tucked them under the covers to warm our beds. I was wracking my brain trying to figure a way to NOT have to get into an ice-cold bed when my sister, via telephone, reminded me about the heated rock thing- "Don't you have any bricks or rocks in your yard?" she asked. No, but I do have quarry tiles and a pizza stone- wooooohoooooo! I put them on the gas grill, warmed them, wrapped them in towels, and voila! a snuggly warm bed throughout the night. One word of caution- towels are flammable, and hot tiles can give you hot buns in more ways than one.....Even Alton Brown would be proud of my "multi-tasking." And by the way, I love this website- I have learned so so much in the last year from you guys. You rock. And so do my oven stones!!

The story thus far:

I've used the starter recipe here and gotten myself a...blob. Nothing but a blob. It doesn't do much, isn't very entertaining, and I can't bake bread with it. However, it smells VERY nicely sour. I don't want to give up on it yet.

I fed it with 1/3 cup of white flour and a little under 1/4 water today. It is the consistency of thick paste.

So as I said in the tutorial thread, if I don't see action by tomorrow I'm going to feed it with 1/4 cup rye flour and 1/8 cup water and see what happens.

I'll keep things posted here so that I don't take up the other thread with personal experiences. :)

Last weekend I taught a class on sourdough quickbreads, so I needed lots of starter. So, I mixed up less than half a bucket full as I went to bed. I like to be careful, so I set a half sheet pan under the bucket.

Then morning came. The sourdough faeries had paid an energetic visit. Here's what I found:

In case that wasn't enough to delight you, here's a closer picture...

Yeah, it had hit the bags of sugar and flour, as well as the boxes of chocolate I'd set out for class. Luckily, none of the bags or boxes were ruined. Cleanup took about half an hour, which made the early morning class prep run a bit longer than expected.

My wife has suggested that maybe the bucket should have been in a sink instead. I think that was a good call on her part.

See, even a self-annointed "expert" can have off days. I hope you feel better about your last kitchen foobar.

Mike

IhavetwofrogsnamedAmandaandJordynJr.

I use farm fresh eggs all the time, I work on an egg farm so they are always available.

However, they are not always what you want exactly as they are not graded for defects.

Case in point, recently while making crepes and adding cracked eggs directly into the mix one at a time I noticed a defect egg fall into the mix which was then ruined. It a complete failure but one that is always funny to egg producers yet everyone else thinks it's disgusting.

So for now on it's one cracked egg at a time into a bowl before adding it to the mix :) 

I know this is a rather common question around these parts, but I'm very new to sourdough, and my seed culture that I've been working on just doesn't seem to be turning into a healthy starter.  I started off from the BBA formula to grow a seed culture, but by day 3, when the culture was supposed to have doubled in bulk, it had not, and but had grown by about half instead.  As instructed, I discarded half and mixed with the prescribed flour and water and fermented for 24 hours.  It again failed to double in bulk, at which point it says to leave it out for another 12 to 24.  I