February 4, 2016 - 4:51pm
Hello from Ontario Canada
I have just joined this site after referring to it many times for info. I have recently become interested in making sourdough breads, etc. and am sure this site will help me to do it well. I really like the site, and am sure I will be looking/reading/learning often.
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Hi,
I joined today because I too love good tasty bread and I have been making sourdough bread for almost two years and my husband has been making it for over three years now. We moved to southern Ontario Canada almost two years ago and last fall started making loaves to sell at a local market. The response has astonishingly positive! I never realized so many people appreciated a true slow rising sourdough bread! I am looking forward to discussing here the baking of bread, croissants and bagels as we expand our business.
Cheers,
Perrette
Hi
You are obviously an experienced baker of sourdough. I am a total newbie, hoping to be successful at this for my own and my family's enjoyment.
Congratulations on your success!
I only started baking bread less than 2 years ago and SD about a year ago. In terms of producing tasty loaves for your family, it shouldn't take you long to get up to speed once you get an active starter going. The key things are to learn at your own pace, and unless you have a special aptitude, to go step by step rather than trying to do too much too soon in terms of ingredients, recipes and methods.
If you eventually arrive at using sprouted flours, multi-stage levain builds, complex recipes, etc., great. But you can make a huge variety of tasty SD loaves just by learning to make a base recipe consistently (e.g. 1 2 3), then using (different proportions of) various flours, adding diverse add-ins, varying the hydration, baking to a more or less bold finish, etc.
Thanks for your comments. I mostly want a consistently good basic SD loaf. It is recommended for my son, for medical reasons. While it is certainly available here, I would like to make my own. However, I might eventually want to follow your suggestion re making various varieties.
I'm a part time Canadian. I live in Portland but spend winters in Rossland BC. The flour here in Canada is great. Robinhood bread flour is bleached so I do avoid that and use their regular flour if I can't find white organic. The little grocery store here has all kinds of land race flours from small local mills that I've been using.
If you're referring to AP, I believe it's bleached since they also offer an unbleached AP.