Here is a picture of my grandaughter Lily with a slice of my first effort, showing off the holey crumb. I used KA bread flour and KA white whole wheat and my newly converted firm starter, and we all liked the flavor. The second try had better oven spring and I imagine the starter is getting stronger, A.
After reading a lot about French flours vs American flours from TFL, I decided to try White Lily's Bread Flour. When I lived in Tennessee, I used to make biscuits with White Lily Self Rising Flour. Its the best (in my opinion) flour to make biscuits. If I'm not mistaken, their flours are made from soft winter wheat, the self rising flour, at least. Since White Lily can only be found in the South, the only way I could get it is by purchasing online. I bought two 5lbs bags of flour, one bread and one self rising (for biscuits).
This is the second version of the challenge loaf, and my recently converted firm starter appears to be getting stronger. The dough had filled the little basket after a night in the fridge and the oven spring was great. I have more pictures of the first effort but can't figure how to post more than one at a time, A.
When putting sourdough into the fridge to become more sour SHOULD IT BE RISEN OR DEFLATED ?
Please tell me what happens between the time it comes out of the fridge till it gets baked...
Thanks in advance
I just got back from a visit overseas to visit my grandmother. I didn't have a lot of time there, but on one of the days I had the pleasure of being served a lovely tea and cake which got me hankering to make a cake after I got back.
Prior to the one-loaf mystery result of my last post, the openest crumb I've gotten from the BBA pain de champagne recipe was a few weeks ago when I modified the recipe to use a dose of the KA levain du jour (dried levain starter), the mild version. I basically made the sponge from this starter as per the instructions that come with it, but made sure the amounts of eveything in the end would total to the same as BBA recipe using the pate fermentee as usual. A second alteration I made was to put most of the rest of the flour (including the whole wheat) into a soaker.
At the moment we have three Welsh Corgi's, two "found us" cats, and a Haflinger pony. I think we give more thought to the healthiness of what we feed them, than what we consume ourselves.
Here's a very pet-healthy pet snack recipe my wife makes about every three weeks. It originated with our wonderful neighbor, and accomplished horsewomen, Cathy, pretty much as she gave it to us. Both our dogs and Mimi, the pony, love them.
Buck-a-Roo Bites
As far as the cookies go, I usually have some basic ingredients and add whatever I might have.
Yesterday I was baking baguettes. I've usually had to bake them in groups of two, not because my oven can't hold up to four, but because I couldn't find a fool-prove way of getting more than two on the hot baking stone using a peel. (I've dropped them on each other, off the back of the stone onto the rack, and, worst of all, onto the oven door.)
I made two batches of bread in slightly different variations on the Pain de champagne from Reinhard's Bread Baker's Apprentice, and the results are quite different.
