Blog posts

2:45 AM March 8, 2013 (50.75 hrs)

Back trouble caused me to turn in early and miss 12 AM deadline. But change seems minimal in both ferments. To make it easier on myself, I'll be referring to the cultures by the color of the container lids: Red for Reinhart, Blue for Ortiz.

Red

Looks exactly the same as yesterday: no bubbles, no change in size.

Reinhart's book says that's to be expected. Proceeded with Phase 2 as directed.

12:00 AM March 7, 2013 (24 hrs)

Reinhart Stater

I noticed a thin layer of clear amber colored liquid develops on top of the mixture between stirs. It was too thin to photograph. Other than that, there was no chnage.

Ortiz Starter

Condensation has appeared on the sides of the container. The shape has flattened somewhat.

Here's my first go at the sourdough oat bread recipe I received from a friend of mine.  I made half a recipe and made note of the weight of each item as I went along.  The formula can be found in grams by following the original posting of the recipe at http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32444/sourdough-oat-bread

The crumb -

Welcome to my Lab of sorts.  For the next week or so, I will be documenting my progress on two different ferments I started at 12AM EST on March 6th, 2013.  The first is from Peter Reinhart's book Artisan Bread Every Day.  The other is from Joe Ortiz's The Village Baker.

We had some semolina left in the house that we needed to get rid of. We usually use it for making porridge (cream of wheat), but winter here is pretty much over with, and we had all this semolina lying around. Having just discovered this site and learned a panload of new techniques, I was eager to try something new. So why not semolina bread?

Well, because semolina isn't really supposed to be used for making bread, and I really should have known that.

My wife is not a big fan of my multi-grain breads and I'm always getting on her for not trying more of my breads.  For this reason I agreed to make her an English Muffin bread, which was simple and plain.  Well you know by now if you follow my posts that I don't know the meaning of the word simple so here is as close as I could bring myself to make a simple English Muffin style bread.

With David Snyder recent post of his new take on SFSD with higher amounts of Semolina and Ian’s new bread with semolina, it was only natural that another semolina bread would fit in this week. This one had a small amount of Desert Semolina - 150g.  We wanted to see if the high gluten, not just protein, claims were true.

I've just updated the sandbox (development) version of this site.  If you are so inclined, take a peek!  Username crust, password crumb to get to the site.

While I've recently revived a sourdough starter and have been keeping it going on my counter, I've also thought that it should be possible to have a ready to use product similar to instant yeast. Perhaps I'm spoiled by the homebrew shop where I can buy dozens of different yeast packets and even some lactobacillus for making sour beers. So when I saw packages of Seitenbacher sourdough on Amazon I bought a box and have now tried out making some bread using it directly, rather than trying to build a culture with it. This is what the company intends, but so far it's not been smooth sailing.