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Help!  I have had my starter in the refrigerator un-toughed for 2 weeks or less.  When I opened it up, it smelled just like lacquer thinner.  It also as some what solidified on top.  When I fed it last it was ovoer 80 in my kitchen.  Should I throw it out and start over?????  I don't want to kill anyone!   Thanks Dorothy

Today we're having a party and I figured (yesterday), I'd make some ciabatta. I never made it before and decided to make Reinhart's (BBA) recipe based on biga. I did scale it up a little to make slightly more. In the process of doing the calculations, I think I discovered some errors in the percentages and corrected them. I made the bread using the corrected recipe (I'll post on that seperately). For the final dough, I used buttermilk instead of water, and I did add about 70% of the optional olive oil.

Reinhart's Ciabatta (Biga)

Ciabatta, excellent holes and crumb

The dough came together as described, mixing in a KA, 4 minutes with paddle, and another 3 with the dough hook, adding just a little flour. While the rest of the baking proceeded as written, I noticed that my dough was actually rising a lot more than I expected. Now, I have to note that the weather is really warm right now (90F+) and my air-conditioning is set at 78F. I let it happen while I remembered some people had had issues with these recipes, so I looked up these old posts. Biggest problem people had was not a good open crumb, so I started to worry...

When I cut the dough in three pieces for placing in the couche it definitely collapsed some, but I decide to just let it rise again. It did. Then I baked, as described, and the result, as far as I am concerned, was just wonderful in shape, texture, crumb.

I will report in a separate post about some of the observations and my thoughts as to why this worked out so well. 

Received the book finally 2 days ago. I had pre-ordered from Amazon and they kept claiming it wouldn't ship to me until October. I complained with customer service as others were receiving it, and when I placed a new order, it said it would ship immediately (I cancelled that one of course). That caused them to send it right away.

Reinhart's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread 

So, I just had to try something and since I had not built a starter yet, and need basic sandwhich bread for my family's daily needs, went for the 100% WW sandwich bread. I followed the biga based recipe and it worked out beautifully. I needed none of the extra flour, although a little got used during hand kneading.

Result shown in the picture, and taste and crust were great.

I have been merrily plodding along with my version of sourdough starters ( 2 at the moment) but took some time to re-read Bill's posting on maintaining a starter. To my horror it seems I have been doing everything wrong, so I decided to start yet another one from Bill's recipe. I have to admit I had been using what I consider to be inferior flour because our store was out of King Arthur, and my starter didn't look too happy. I measured out the required amount and added KA all purpose flour and spring water and stirred like mad. The mixture was thicker than I expected, but I put tape to mark the level and left it on the counter. It did develop bubbles but hardly rose at all even after sitting all day, so last night I tossed half and fed it again. It is now 12.30pm and there are bubbles but no sign of rising. Bill, if you are out there and not too busy, could you please tell me what you think I did wrong? I gave my unhappy looking old starter some Bob's Red Mill organic rye and it perked right up. Maybe ignorance was bliss and I should have muddled along? A

Many many months ago, in Austria far away, a sourdough starter was supplied from a baker, good and qualified. The Austrian starter was dried and traveled to China where part of it mixed and grew nurtured in the presence of Chinese all purpose flour and later with Austrian Rye flour. Sometimes it sat out to grow, sometimes it sat in a refrigerator, one time even froze but it lived long and prospered and provided many a loaf of bread. Then it was dried. This happened at various times in the last few months.

It might be interesting to compare the starter 6 months ago and now, making two identical loaves and see if the SD has changed in flavor. Two very different environments. A change in starter flours and water not to mention treatment. Will they taste the same? Will they rise the same? Have I changed the characteristics of the starter from the original?

First part of experiment requires re-hydration of dried starters, then feed and stabilize, keeping them separate but treating them alike. Then to use in a recipe and do blind taste tests. Mad scientist has her baggies of dried starter ready and they are February dried starter, April, and August, a control has been made using no starter. 10g of each dried starter was placed into a jar and 40g water was added, after 10minutes 15g of rye flour was stirred in. Each is covered with butter paper and just sitting there waiting for action. One interesting observation...April dried starter smells like cream cheese. (it should be noted that this sample was stored in glass for a long time and the others in plastic baggies...hmmmm)

I made this rye-fennel crackerbread from the new Leader book, Local Breads. Easy and good! The recipe is here.

Susanfnp

http://www.wildyeastblog.com

So for the first time this week, I got together some people would had expressed interest in starting up a bread baking club and we crowded into my tiny kitchen and baked a dozen baguettes! I had originally intended to have a side by side comparison of baguettes with/without poolish, but just getting introduced to the bread making process was plenty for round one. We used Leader's parisian daily bread recipe for half ver batim, and substituted about 250g of poolish in for the other half of the breads. Everyone took note that the dough with a preferement was far more extenisble and sweeter tasting than then dough without, but that was all we took time to discuss. I did my best to let everyone there make bread with minimal guidance, and stuck mostly to explaining what was happening chemically during fermentation and baking. Overall, it was a really big success. No one had ever made baguettes before except for myself, and I hardly touched the dough, and the bread turned out great. I think a few people's interest were really piqued and a rich baking community with hopefully develop out of this. These are some pictures during the day:

A cross section o f our very first baguette:

we didn't wait till everything was done baking before we started feasting:

about half the gang:

I've since loaned out most of my bread books to interested folks and have been asked to write an article about challah for Cornell Hillel's magazine (I'm not jewish, but I read everything Glezer's had to say about challah). We're kind of rogue baking club at this point, no real ties to the university and no nice kitchen to bake in, but that may change in coming weeks. Steve Kaplan, a cornell prof, just published a book "Good Bread is Back" and had a raucous spot on conan o'brien (who was kind of an ass, in my opinion). I'll hopefully be in touch with him this week and see if he'd be the faculty advisor of our group and then we could get some of that over abundant cornell money and maybe even some kitchen space.

Meanwhile, I've been doing some baking myself-and not blogging about it. Last week, I made a levain couronne to take to a pasta feast down the block. It was loosely based on the Tornato from artisan baking.

It was pretty giant (the peel is 14" wide):

and also pretty awesome inside:

I have not been so proud of a loaf since the first time I made bread. Incredibly complex flavor, super moist crumb and a deeply caramelized crust. I served it with herb-oil and some asiago cheese; it was well received! Last week I also made 2 loaves of blue cheese and walnut levain based on pearl's walnut levain, which were tasty too.

I've learned to bake around my homeworks pretty well, and hopefully won't have to slow down too much as the semester gets going. I'd like to still make my own weekly bread all year. That said the problem sets and programming assignments have started to roll in, so we'll see if I have any time to bake outside of Better Bread Better World. Even still, that would be okay with me- getting my friends hooked was very exciting!

-Ben

Two Starters: Sponge-started white (french?) above, yeast-leavened sourdough below

So, this weekend, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of baking with a sponge starter and a yeast-leavened sourdough (yeah, yeah, so sue me).  I wanted to feel the different textures see the different crusts, and make other comparisons between working with the two kinds of starter.  For both recipes I used the Joy of Cooking.  My experiences were, I'm sure, typical: the sourdough was much drier and the sponge very sticky; the sourdough was easier to work from the start, the sponge took a couple of foldings on a floured board.  As with most home bread-baking, where total failure is almost impossible, the outcomes were VERY good, in both cases.  Taste-wise, the french turned out slightly better.

And the insides

Whilst cleaning out the coin container on my dresser in preparation for taking the coins to the supermarket to be counted, I found an unused gift card from Barnes & Noble.  Had it been there 8 months?  20 months?  Who can say; the question was - what to do with it?

What type of book to buy was not in question, but exactly which book was.  I still don't have any of the first four Reinhart books (and would very much like American Pie), Leader has just released a new one, and there are other classics I don't have.  Based on reviews and comments here I decided to get Reinhart's new Whole Grain Breads.

This is without question an excellent book.  I have read some of the chapters and skimmed through the rest, and I would say it will take 4-5 thorough readings until I have absorbed everything Reinhart has to say.  Which is bad, because I am still re-reading The Bread Builders and trying to absorb that.   Reinhart has put together a lot of thoughts that I have been stumbling towards over the last year as I have tried to increase the fraction of whole grains in my bread (and other baked stuff), and it was interesting to see that the bibliography included many books (such as Bread Science) that  have read in the last year, as well as a nod to this web site and its participants.

I decided to start out with the Transitional Country Hearth Loaf, as my family's preferences lean toward white(er) loaves.

Given that I had not yet read the Theory and Process of Delayed Fermentation chapters when I jumped ahead to the recipe, the steps were fairly straightforward for anyone who had made a RLB or Hammelman recipe.   I tried to follow the recipe exactly to see if I would get the results from the book.  One point that bothered me was where the sequence said "combine the soaker and biga pieces with all other ingredients".  The "other ingredients" were 5g salt and 7g yeast; I was expecting some more water, flour, or something.  But when I mixed it up the texture seemed right.  One thing I did is carefully interweave the 12 pieces of biga and 12 pieces of soaker into a neat 3-layer pattern with the salt and yeast in between the layers.  I have zero artistic ability but the weave looked neat (unfortunately I did not hae the camera at that point) and I was gratified the next day to find a similar picture in the opening chapters of the book.

Here is the proofed loaf on the peel, waiting to be slashed and go in the oven:

sPh - Reinhart Transition Country Proofed Loaf

Here is the baked loaf about to come out of the oven.  Since I proofed it in the banneton I was not able to put semolina on the peel.  I should have put some between the loaf and the end of the peel before sliding but did not, so the result was some ovalization of the loaf:

sPh - Reinhart Transition Country Baked Loaf

This picture on the counter gives some indication of the size of the loaf with the thermapen in the background.  Quite a bit of distortion from the wide angle lens though since the standard Corelle bowl in the backgorund looks small:

sph - Reinhart Transition Country Baked Loaf on Counter

Here is the "crust and crumb".  I took this outside to get some strong light, which allowed a good handheld closeup.  The crust was good; thick and chewy but not too tough or crunchy.  The crumb was open and had a good taste but was a bit dry:

sph - Reinhart Transition Country Crust and Crumb

And here is an end-on shot of the sliced loaf.  Note that despite my careful layering of the soaker (darker) and biga (lighter), mixing, and a total of 7 minutes of kneading there are still clear areas of light and dark crumb:

 sph - Reinhart Transition Country End View Crumb

Conclusions?  Overall this was a good bread, well-received by family and neighbors.  As mentioned my family and I found it a bit dry.  The published hydration is 65%; when I make it again I will try 70% or even 75.  The taste was good with no bitterness and just a hint of "whole wheat" flavour; the crust was very good.  Toasted with a little butter it was excellent.   A good recipe and actually very easy to make.

sPh 

Can someone tell me how to print out a recipee on this site without printing 25 pages? This sounds stupid< I know, but I can't seem to print them!