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I have been making a starter and it was doing okay i think. I wasn't being very rigid with it, but it was living and smelled amazing. I am currently trying to create bread with it. I have low hopes as of the stage of mixing it into dough as it just seems off but I will update this when I get closer to the end.

A few hours later... 

I wanted to try this recipe again but with more of the porridge and cooked a bit longer. I increased the porridge to 15% and cooked it with half milk and water. However, in order to keep the porridge moist during cooking, an unspecified about of water was added. The porridge is kept at room temperature covered until the next day.

I’m a bit out of practice making pastry. I usually only bake a pie when we have friends over for dinner. So with the pandemic it has been a while since I made one. For this pie I decided to try Kate McDermott’s all butter pastry from her book Art of Pie.

Traditional Art of the Pie All-Butter Dough

An all-butter crust is not as flaky as a butter and leaf lard crust, but the flavor can’t be beat.

FOR ONE DOUBLE-CRUST PIE OR TWO SINGLE-CRUST PIES

INGREDIENTS

2½ cups (363 grams) all-purpose flour, unbleached

½ teaspoon (3 grams) salt

Our building's A.M. is retiring at the end of this month and we wanted to give her something to take home in the most alfanso way.  Sesame Semolina and Ciabatta.  

My wife's contribution were her fabulous orange chocolate chunk meringue cookies.

Nov. 17, 2021. 69th bake.

Continuing along the lines of the last several bakes, this was about 300 grams of BRM WW red wheat and about 100 grams of Patel stone-ground WW durum.

Tweaks: Full 2% salt this time. No milk. 1 hr autolyse with salt. All sourdough this time, 41 grams, no commercial yeast.  1 tsp of ground-toasted bread spice*, plus another 1/2 tsp of whole caraway. 10 grams whole chia seed pre-soaked in 40 grams water.  

Did 100 folds of "kneading in the air" prior to some stretch-and-folds during bulk.

I bake 2 loaves of country bread once a week always with slightly varying formulas and methods. This week I tried only feeding my levin once a day for the whole week and building up to the amount of levain I needed on bake day by feeding it twice before mixing into dough. Previously I had started feeding levain twice a day 3 days before bake and three times a day starting 2 days before. I tried this new method in order to minimize waist since I rarely use levain for other purposes and to go through flour less quickly.

We've been traveling. It seems a bit odd to say that we are vacationing, since we are retired, so “traveling” might be the better verb.  Last week we were in Nashville, TN.  This week we are in Sapphire, NC.  

Back from two weeks off without any baking. My starter was refreshed two weeks ago at 50% hydration, given 1 hour at room temperature then refrigerated. The pH had only dropped to 4.4 or so when I returned so there was plenty of food left. I discarded some, then brought the hydration up to 100% and did a small feed. He tripled in 3 hours but had not yet peaked, so I discarded and fed him again. 5 hours later he had peaked at 3.5-4x with the dome just starting to flatten. He was ready to build a levain for this bake.

Made this soft and sweet sandwich loaf.

Still learning, but this is my favourite kneaded bread so far. I've used this recipe for cinnamon buns and mini loaves as well. It holds shapes really nicely. I have made pumpkins, skulls, snakes, and snails for example with it. 

Borrowing Mashing from Beer Brewers

In the last two weeks, I've played with "mashing" malted rye and buckwheat to produce a sweet scald for my baguettes. Mash is a term used by beer brewers when they add enzymes to their grains and keep them hot over time to break the starches down into sugars. My mash blended buckwheat flour, diastatic malted rye flour, and hot water, and kept it at 55 celcius for 20 hours. 55 celcius was the best my proofing box could do, and was also a good temperature to keep amylase enzymes active and not destroy them.