Blog posts

Well, 5:00 Wednesday evening was first feeding time for my starters.   The one on the refrigerator looked nice and bubbly after 48 hours.   The one that was outside, however, was relatively dried out from being out in the wind for 2 days.

Those were the words she said, and when the lady speaks, she gets :) HAHA! Made some honey whole wheat with flax in it. We got this awesome cranberry/vanila peanut butter last week and needed something hearty to slather it on. YUM!

Have some sourdough ciabatta cooling now. Gosh...I soooo love the smell of sourdough!

This is the second bread that I've baked with my white sourdough starter and it is mmm-mmm good!

This is the Mill Loaf that is in Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf. Which I might add is a beautiful book!

Sourdough Ciabatta - Second Try

Sourdough Ciabatta - Firm Starter Version (loaves)

After reading all the discussions about "flour vs. micro organisms" in getting a good starter, I decided to run my own test.

I believe that the flour has all the vital nutrients that a starter needs to survive, but I also believe that the location and local flora and fauna play a part. I believe that is what makes San Francisco sourdough taste different than a Russian sourdough, which tastes different from a European sourdough.

I started my first ever sourdough starter last night. So tonights feeding is feeding 2...24 hours after it began.

Here is where it is up to now. No sign of anything happening yet but I know it can take up to a week, so my fingers are crossed.

I also made the buttermilk cluster today with wholemeal wheat and wholeleal spelt flour.

Yummo! I am eating it as I write!

My mission has been to get large, glossy holes in a bread like the wonderful examples I have been admiring. I achieved some degree of success with the NYT no knead recipe this weekend. I followed the recipe faithfully and even used the floured cotton towel technique. The soft dough stuck to the cotton, but not too badly. There was no problem with the bread sticking to the dutch oven. It pulled away from the sides as it baked.  I did leave it in the oven long enough to scorch the bottom a bit in an attempt to get a deeper brown top crust.

Since the breads I made most recently were both sourdough ryes, I was looking for something different this time around that would work well for sandwiches. My first inclination was to haul out an old favorite, a honey whole wheat bread. While flipping through Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads, I happened across a buttermilk whole wheat recipe that I had not tried previously. Since I had all of the necessary materials on hand, I thought that I would give it a try. The recipe follows [with my notes]. I'll also include additional comments at the end