Blog posts

I've been lurking for a while and this is my first blog post. Thanks for everyone for making this site great. I am an amateur and have been baking bread for a couple years. My daughters and I made a sourdough starter named Charlotte early on. I keep her on the counter and we feed her mostly everyday and she has been refrigerated once or twice for short periods. She goes on trips with us as well. She lives in Mississippi and has vacationed Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana and Illinois. 

Looking to shake things up just a little, I decided to change a bit from my recent Semolina with Rye Levain concoction.  Not a lot, just enough to see what would happen by altering that one thing.  And that one thing was to use 60% durum/40%AP flour in the final mix rather than 100% durum.  Otherwise all things remained the same.  Well, except that I actually did a 3 stage build this time.

Baguettes are 3x350g, Batard is 1x600g

This week’s bake is my second attempt at a SD with rolled oats. I tried similar loaf last week and  though it was a good loaf, i wanted to make some changes.

 Formula

I've noticed that my dining room is consistently 79°F this summer with the air conditioning on. What a great time to try making yeast water following dabrownman's Yeast Water Primer.

I bought my organic raisins and apples at the local foo-foo health nut store, mashed and cubed per instructions and will worry the mess to death for the next few days with shaking and fanning, honeying it up and feeding it more oranges than I would ordinarily eat myself.

Are bread heads out of their minds? :)

Murph

    I wanted to make some good soft and flavorful potato bread and this formula ended up as close to what I imagined as possible.

It's very similar to store bought potato bread but much, much better.  The ricotta cheese combined with the sweet potatoes and red potatoes really gave the crumb a nice soft and moist texture which is perfect for this type of bread.

The crumb was not terribly open, but that's okay, since who wants your sandwich fillings pouring out anyway :).

Main ingredients: 100% Bread flour, tangzhong, oatmeal, carob, generic preferment.

I issued myself a challenge (posted here in the Challenge forum) to see what kind of fun I could have with a simple 123 method sourdough. In other words, 1 part fresh starter, 2 parts water (or other liquid) and 3 parts flour. Also, a customer had asked me to create a 'sweet' version of my Three Friends Levain (Tom[ato], Olive and Rosemary) that she could have with peanut butter and jam. So, a double challenge!

Not to be complete and comprehensive and certainly not to be pedantic, but I decided to list a set of my own do and don’t “baking rules”.  I expect no one to take any/some/all of these to heart or put into practice - least of all because I say I do them.  None of these are absolute, but in general, they serve as my personal list of commandments – at least around dough and baking.
  
We have, will develop and hopefully forever evolve our own individual set of rhythms and axioms for what works best for each of us.  There is probably no “one size fits all”.

It was a super busy weekend: I was also making a few other things besides Joze's cranberry tarragon bread...

Homemade taco styled by my younger son...

It's super delicious!