Last night we returned from two weeks on vacation to an empty refrigerator and no bread whatsoever.   While traveling, I did not rush around looking at bakeries, sampling the fine local breads, searching for flour, or any other such thing.   The only homage to bread I inflicted on my family was a wee bit of shopping for baskets.   First I bought a basket which I had a vague notion I would proof bread in.   Yet as soon as I made my purchase, I realized that I would never, never pollute it with flour and wet dough and suchlike:

Which meant that I needed another basket for proofing.  This eventually manifested as:

which when purchased I immediately started to question.   Yet basket and no bread means:

and

and finally a bit of bread to eat:

The bread was loosely based on Pan de Horiadaki, but I wasn't much in the mood for following directions after a long trip home.  So let's call it Pan Tipo de Horiadaki or Sorta Horiadaki.  Anyhow, it was nice to have bread in the house again.  And the basket isn't too messed up.

And incidentally - in neither of the two stores where I bought the baskets did the sales people know what they were - i.e., who made them, where they came from, etc.   In the second store they said their Indian crafts vendor showed up in the middle of the night and placed his merchandise in the store and only barked at them if they asked him any questions.   So, does anyone out there have any idea what type of baskets these are?   First bought in Estes Park, CO, second in Boulder. 

I'll close with a little Rocky Mountain splendor:

I've always been a little sad that because I use a linen tea towel to line my baskets, very little (if any) of the pattern of the basket shows through in the flour on the finished loaf. (I do have one small round basket that looks very natural / foodsafe, so I have tried that one without a towel, with good results. But my other baskets kind of look like the wicker may be chemically treated, so I didn't want to try them.)

A little while ago I had an idea how to get the nice pattern without a brotform, and I finally remembered to try it in my last bake! The recipe was the ubiquitous Norwich Sourdough from Susan's Wild Yeast Blog.

My idea was to use a "ribbed" linen placemat to line the basket, instead of a tea towel. I have some natural (undyed, or at least appear so) placemats which have been through the wash several times, so I was pretty sure they were foodsafe. Here's a poorly-lit picture of the one I used:
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I sprinkled some rice flour on the placemat first, before dusting with quite a lot of white (AP) flour. This worked very well, the loaf turned out cleanly after proofing, no sticking at all. And the resulting pattern on the loaf was great! Picture:

In the next picture you can see this loaf with its "dough-brothers", one of which was proofed in the aforementioned foodsafe basket, the other three in baskets/bowls lined with tea towels. I kind of like the variety!

(Note: the loaves have a bit of a golden color to them which I attribute to substituting some of the white flour in the recipe with kamut flour, which is an ancient relative of durum.)

Happy baking,
Mike

I've learned so much from everyone in my journey to make perfect sourdough. But I have two unanswered problems:

1) If I keep my dough at a high hydration level (in order to perfect the crumb), it sticks to the sides of my banneton. It doens't matter if I use my wicker one or linen lined banneton, whether I flour the sides or grease the sides, the dough sticks and won't come out...

2) If I am able to get the dough out unscathed, it always seems to collapse and never rise enough again. The bread still tastes wonderful but I wonder if I am making my loaves too big, so the dough cannot hold it's shape. My loaves are typically ~12 inch round loaves.

How can I use my banneton to create a well risen loaf that holds it shape when turned out onto the baking stone?

Thaks for any suggestions!

They have both German- and Slovakian-made cane brotforms and bannetons, both at prices rather less than I've seen most other places.

http://fantes.com/brotforms.html

Just wondering. Not getting a stand mixer opens up about $350 for some other needed bread-related things.