Hello from an American baker in Japan
Hello, this is my first post on TFL, but I've been reading and learning here for at least a year.
A little about me; I am a 30 yr old male and I work as a camera operator and video editor in Tokyo.
I began baking a year ago when I started helping a friend with a small restaurant on the weekends.
He has a wood-fired brick oven meant for pizzas, but he rarely puts it to use, so I started making bread dough to see if I could bake it in the brick oven. Then I started getting into making levain breads and so far I have read the books by Ken Forkish, Chad Robertson, and Jeffery Hamelman. My first 10 bakes or so were all large volume, like 20-30 boules, loading 10 at a time in the oven. My bread was inconsistent and sometimes just a flat brick of dough out of the oven, but I taught myself so much through this trial and error. My loaves are starting to come out pretty nicely.
For my first post I will leave you with a quick review of Ken Forkish's Overnight Country Brown. My version could be called, "All day, All night Country Brown" because I bulked for about 10 hours overnight, shaped in the morning, then retarded the final proofing for 9 hours. It came out with less volume than I would have liked, but I think that I over-proofed a bit. Even Forkish's pics in the book do not have a whole lot of volume, so it could be the nature of this recipe.
I am not baking with a dutch oven yet, but that is my next move, and I think that will improve volume and crust.
I really like high percentage whole wheats recipes, so I will probably do this again, but I think I will drop the hydration from 78% to 70 or 72%. This was the stickiest dough I have ever worked with! Wonderful flavor on the acetic side of things.