Blog posts

I've been baking bread occasionally for several years, but it's only within the last year or so that I've started to become particularly interested in it.  I've also shifted gradually to baking more and more with whole grains, until these days probably only 5% or so of the loaves I make use white flour.  I've been wanting to purchase a grain mill for quite some time to use in my bread-baking, but kept putting off the purchase.  I knew very little about mills, and wanted to be sure that I researched my decision thoroughly.  In addition, I'm a serious tightwad and mills ar

Today I baked the sourdough bread I've been looking for ever since starting this odyssey. It has a crispy crust and a stretchy, holey crumb. And it's easy. As I told a couple of friends earlier, "...it's reproducible, if the weather stays exactly how it is today."

I'm not suggesting that this could be anyone else's ultimate sourdough, but it sure is mine, at least for right now. Thanks to all who have helped me over the past year or so, even unwittingly. It continues to be great fun. The recipe is below.

I had to bring cookies to a church function.  My husband recommended the Sierpinski Carpet fractal cookies shown on evilmadscientist.com.  I thought the square shapes might be a little boring and decided to do Sierpinski triangle cookies instead.

 I made them green and added peppermint extract.  The recipes I used were:

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 egg

for the chocolate part and

I have a fledgling food blog, and I've recently posted about my travails in making simple white sandwich bread from BBA.

The story has two parts:

- Part I: failure

- Part II: redemption

As I post more about bread, I'll be sure to cross-reference here.

JP

Gosh it's been too long since I posted any blog entries. 

Anyone who's seen my recent posts scattered throughout the forums will know I've been having difficulties with maintaining shape in my sourdough attempts as well as getting too much sour flavour (yes there really is such a thing...at least for my tastes! :) )

Well, I thought I could sail on through to the actual bread making but it seems not without a slight hitch that needs some sage minds to help out.

Meet Clem.

Clem is Audrey's first child. He was made of the following:

30g Audrey stiff starter (rye)
100g spring water
100g UAP flour

So it's now 9 a.m. (about) and we're ready to go with feed number three. We've taken apart the previous feed ball and scooop out 30g of that starter from the bubbly center.

I might note here that there's a slight sour smell present although not terribly strong.

In the meantime, Mini has added a post to the original forum thread, saying she's started up a stiff ball as well so we'll then be able to track the two stiff starters at the same time to see what happens.

So at this point, we're at the 10 hour mark and it's getting late so I mix up a fresh ball. I gather grab some of the previous ball's insides and mix up the following:

30g stiff starter
50g spring water
50g organic rye

Here I cut back from the previous 88 grams of flour which made, in my opinion, too stiff a ball. I'm still just guestimating at this point.

And here is the resulting ball:

I'm starting this blog to track the events in the life of little Audrey 2, a reluctant starter that began as a rather wet batter form and, as recommended by Mini, was transformed into a ball of stiff starter.