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Well I got a successful yeast water culture going and it is bubbling and fizzing like a can of Vernor's ginger ale! A big shout out to dabrownman for pmi'ng me detailed instructions, followed to the tee. I baked this exactly as the last sd boule only using YW to build the levain. The dough felt immediately different -- more extensible and felt nearly fully developed after the second set of S&F's. Nice volume, nice open crumb and very mild flavour and great chew - almost too mild, so I guess I have come to appreciate the flavour profile of my sweet levain!

This is the same 675 AP and  125 WW Pain de Campagne I have been making.  However, this dough had a different feel all together.  Again, never throw out what could be a disaster.  This was proofed in a regular bowl instead of my standard banneton.  I am not used to a bowl I suppose.  The dough was more stiff than usual and appeared a little lumpy.  The proof looked weird.  It did not have a nice rounded bump when I removed it from the fridge.

Last loaf of the day, haven't cut it to check the crumb, but will post pic when I do!

Buttered right out of the pan, love the flavor it adds.

Looking forward to a toasted slice of this to go with my oatmeal in the morning!

After two weeks of travel and eating out, it was super nice this weekend to be back in my kitchen and able to eat at home.  I celebrated by baking three batches of bread.

The first, pictured above, was a 60% whole wheat, 13% spelt sourdough (73% hydration).  It was good, though a bit grainier than what my family typically likes.  Still, we enjoyed it.

I also made a batch of Hokkaido Milk Bread.

I was gonna make a 50% wholewheat ciabatta with hybrid levin. After milking the soy bean,I thought I should added some of the soy pulps in my loaf. 

The calcuated hydration was at 80%, I guess the grains soak up a lot of water, so I ended up with a tacky dough instead of a ciabatta dough. 

The coming week would be a ciabatta challenge again! Hopefully no pulps will come in my way. 

For this pizza crust the girls wanted to go back to our Focaccia Romana  crust that has garlic rosemary and sun dried tomato.  I said OK but didn’t tell them that the dough would be SD instead of their favorite poolish one.

We had pinched 40 g of fully ripe 100% multi-grain levain from last Friday’s bake and then fed it 40 g each of AP and water making this the 5th feeding for this levain.  We let it sit on the counter for 2 hours and it easily doubled.

I've been teaching four hour bread classes to raise money for my daughter's school and for the food bank, and it's been amazingly fun. For each class we bake a pizza for lunch (with wine and beer if there are adults) and make a few breads. Usually a sourdough, and a couple of others as they request. I just did a class for four middle-school aged girls where we made two soudoughs, pizza, monkey bread and cinnamon rolls -- they were a fantastic group.

Anyway, tons of fun.

Yeast Water is alive and it's time to play.  A big thanks to dabrownman for his simple instructions to get this culture going and maintenance.  I highly suggest a post on this as was explained to me for those who might be interested in making their own culture.  Then it will be an archived easy approach to a natural levain.  My YW is being fed with currants/apples and has a lovely sweet hard cider smell to it.  Since it was so young I decided to do a hybrid with some White Starter as backup and to add a bit of the twang.  So I pre fermented 20% of the flour.