I sold my first sandwich loaf recently! I think it turned out quite nice. I also made some sweet white batards, and experimented a bit on sourdough.
The sandwich loaf came out quite nicely, it was made using KA Bread Flour and SAF RED instant yeast at 70% hydration with autolyse and french folds. The batards were identical to these, but were made at 65% hydration with 25% AP flour and 75% bread flour.
The truly interesting experiment was the sourdough. I have begun experimenting with commercial yeast spiked sourdoughs, and I have to say that I'm disappointed. What I have understood is that commercial bakeries spike their sourdoughs with instant yeast to gain a normal production schedule from an otherwise unreliable source of leavening. But if one were to do this, there would be very little time to develop the sour flavor. So I troubled building a very sour starter over the course of three days, and spiked the final dough 0.6% yeast in addition to 33% starter. I fermented the dough, degassed, shaped, proofed, and baked it right away. Sadly the flavor was lacking. I'll have to go back to the drawing board for my sourdough.
I'm currently looking into JMonkey's tips on squeezing out more sour from sourdough.
