My first sourdough batch!

Gracias for all your kind comments. It's wonderful to get such great feedback whilst starting down this new road.

I made all the dough in two batches simultaneously. Recipe-wise, I multiplied a basic French bread formula -- 2 cups of flour to 1 cup of water -- with starter instead of poolish (a scant 1/4 cup per 3 c. of flour), autolyzed the heck out of it, gave it enough mixing to look fairly consistent, then folded it about four times before leaving it to ferment at cool room temp overnight. In the morning, it had doubled and then some. I folded it again (and it degassed quite a bit in the process, then put it in the fridge. When I came home from work, it had doubled again. (This starter is a champ!)

I immediately started cutting it into hunks (my new scale isn't here yet, so I eyeballed it) and shaped it into small baguettes/batards using the Forestier method from the Julia Child videos. (The 800 bench slaps part I skip, but her shaping style works pretty well for me.)

The texture of the dough was just about perfect for shaping -- soft but not too soft to handle -- and it worked better this time than the many other times I've tried it. Don't know if that's the dough or if I'm finally getting the hang of it.

I laid all the loaves on foil sheets covered with coarse corn meal (I ran out of parchment, which really would have worked better), and let them rest a bit then started putting them in the oven, three on the upper rack and two on the lower. As I mentioned I started with a cold oven, which worked but didn't give me great brown color on the first batch. The other loaves also feel a bit lighter, I'm sure because they had more time to proof.

I did spray the tops of the loaves and the walls of the oven to create some steam; did not use the pan in the bottom. I did not use a stone. I just put the loaves, foil and all, on cookie sheets. The foil stuck to the loaves, but peeled off okay (mostly) and the bottoms were nice and crispy.

Slashing also worked better with this dough than any other I have tried. Having achieved fairly rotten results in the past using razors, chef's knives and what-have-you, this time I picked out my wonderful, heavy serrated bread knife (Cuisinart, found it on sale for about $8). It worked fabulously, in part I think because the texture of this dough was so good -- nice and spongy.

It took 45-50 minutes for each batch at 425.

I can't take too much credit for the shelter thing. My friend does the real work -- cooking, delivering, serving. For me, it just provided a good excuse to try out my new sourdough starter. My investment was two bucks worth of flour and a whole lotta fun.

I had kind of laid off bread-baking for the last month or so because I was getting so discouraged at not making visible progress. So this sourdough adventure has given my enthusiasm a great kick-start.

Thanks again for all the encouragement!

"I am not a cook. But I am sorta cooky."