Blog posts

I'm new to the Fresh Loaf website, and a new student of home bread-baking. I want to chronicle my journey on this blog, and I'm definitely after that ultimate taste and texture in creating bread.  

Or was it 2 cups of starter, 1 cup filtered water and 1 cup of unbleached white bread flour?  I can't even remember.  That's why I've decided to make use of this blog; keep a track of everything I'm doing.  I left it to ferment overnight and in the morning it was frothy and spongy, but it didn't seem to have grown at all.  Is it supposed to?

Today, I made several bread using TFLers fomula. All of them are delicious.

First, I made mutigrain (100% whole wheat flour used) using Franko's formula.  I decreased the water amount down to 9% compare to the original one.  I have make his original one at the first time  that was a failure that the crumb was really tight.  The flavor was great but the texture was dry. I was kneading too much...    Anyway I will challenge the original one when I get spelt flour because it is a great recipe!

I made my old standby yesterday and today, 123 sourdough.  The dough was very wet;  I must have either a >100% starter or I mismeasured.  I used only white flour, and I know that that sometimes leads to wetter doughs, but I've made 100% white before and it wasn't a problem.  It was extraordinarily hard to shape and work with.  I made a double batch;  4 loaves.  two rose in small bowls in the fridge overnight and two rose in loaf pans.  Not a lot of oven spring on the "boules" but the loaf pans gave more support and they turned out better.

I've been playing with bwraith's no-knead sourdough formula and tried to adjust it for the vagaries of October in Wisconsin.  I've landed on what seems to be a fine method (for October in Wisconsin).  

With apologies to bwraith, whose baker blog I've been stalking, here's the formula I used:

50 g 100% hydration starter

320 g water

450 g flour (roughly 10% rye, 45% each AP and Dakota Maid bread flour)

9 g salt

A couple of weeks ago I started on my journey to make sourdough bread.  Having been a home bread maker for nearly twenty years on and off, I thought (wrongly)... easy!   I AM such a funny girl!  The first lot of starter got thrown out after three days (it was probably fine, but any bubbles it might have had completely disappeared after I added tap water instead of filtered.)  Anyway, a new lot was started.  Just 50 grams white unbleached bread flour and 50 grams filtered water.  Long story short....

Well . . . I'm new here.  Started baking about two years ago when I shaped some leftover pizza dough into a breadstick-sized baguette and never looked back.  Got into sourdough this past summer when a friend gave me a starter that had been given to her father, a dentist in Bend, Oregon, in lieu of payment for dental work, back in 1963.  Here are some English muffins the little guy helped raise.  Adapted from this formula at Wild Yeast, using white whole wheat flour.

Oh the freezer was empty of bread.. I baked up some good old basic sourdough @100.  The recipe from the http://www.northwestsourdough.com  site.  Where Teresa now has her free download book available!

Ever since txfarmer posted her recipe these have been on my "to bake' list, and once my grandgirls saw the cute "bone" cutters there was no excuse. Lily and I mixed the dough on Saturday afternoon but for various reasons we wrapped it well and placed it in the refrigerator overnight. It sat on the counter while I made the requisite Sunday morning sourdough pancakes which were voted the best ever, maybe because I used my cookie scoop and the pancakes were smaller than usual. Then Lily and I started rolling and cutting, and yes, it makes a lot of biscuits!

So, yes, this evening we had a user get upset and try to expunge himself from the site.  For now, I have shut down the account.