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After my numerous trial and errors journey of trying to grow my very first sourdough starter I am pleased to announce that this morning a miracle happened!!!she finally ripened (she passed the float test with awesome bubbles and a mildly sweet + acidic/sour aroma) and me being an eager beaver I decided to have a go at making a sourdough bread using the Tartine 80% hydration whole wheat recipe and it worked,I have made my very first sour dough bread,elated best describes my feeling right now!!! Look at the crumb on that baby... :-)  

Scalded Rye Bread

It's been a worthwhile experience. I feel I've learned a lot of the basics for handling rye flours. Four of eighteen I'll add to my modest repertoire: Rye Sticks, Milwaukee Rye, Zeltan (Tyrolean Fruit Bread) and Rye Squares; I'll likely tweak them all to better match the flavors I want.

Decided it was time to have a go at using sourdough only in my favourite yeasted bread.  

the recipe (From Rose levy Berambaum's Bread Bible) uses white bread flour but I chose to use a little whole wheat in the mix.

Grain soaker - 236 gm mixed grains,113 gm hot water,9 gm salt soaked overnight 

final dough

237 gm bread flour

65 gm whole wheat flour

12 gm gluten

153 gm water

12 gm honey

Levain - 85 gm 125% hydration

Happy New Year to all, from a newbie to bread and to this forum!

I agree with CAphyl: There's something special about the notion of giving a yeast bread as a holiday gift. And I could be biased by my recent discovery of wild yeast, but I love the idea even more if the loaf is a sourdough.

Or last 2 bakes of the year.  Took a 2 week hiatus from my bread reservation program and put the culture to sleep in the fridge for a week.  It is back out and coming back into it's own but it needs 3-4 days of regular refreshing before it's ready to build a levain.  Should have thought to freeze some bread for the break.  I didn't so I made French Bread based on the Tradition baguette formula incorporating 5% whole Rye for part of the flour.  I made 750g batard's proofed en couche.

We have a tradition to bring in the New Year with pizza.  How this got started I can’t remember but I do remember the lobster tails that used to be NY Eve fare.  This year’s crust was the best yet though and so was the sauce according to my daughter who keeps track of these things.

So, how'd I do on last year's list I posted?

1)  I will continue to share home-made bread.  Did that pretty well -- my end of year total for dough produced was over 324 kilograms (more than 714 lbs), with (my guess) more than 80% of that gifted.

2)  I will move more.  Haven't done enough of that.

3)  I will do more of what I want.  Still trying.

I love this basic formula that Karin came up with for these German style rolls.  I've made a Yeast Water version and a Sourdough version with great success.  I have been baking so much rye bread lately as a recipe tester for Stan's new book, yet to be released that I needed something lighter.  My Yeast Water starter is no more and my SD starter was not refreshed, so IY would have to do.

With my recent obsession to perfect my bread making skills and while still waiting for my sourdough starter to mature (it is 8 days old eexactly but it's still not passing the floating test although it has bubbles and smells vinegary I don't know what I am doing wrong there) I decided to experiment;I decided to do a tester loaf and see if I could come up with something edible .

This Boule is made with some poolish and some of the sourdough starter discard (I thought why keep wasting flour when I can use this in some way even if its to just flavour the dough and here's the result!

So, my shiny new brotforms (Thanks, Ian, for the lead to Lucky Clover Trading) were calling out, "Use us!" And I had been thinking to use some steel cut oats for something soft and hearty... and maybe adding a bonus of cranberries and walnuts. I started with Wooden Spoon's Steel Cut Oat Sourdough formula and made a few modifications that included increasing the WW to 25%, using AP at 25% (running low on BF) and, of course, adding fruit and toasted nuts.