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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!

Earlier this month I participated in Paney Camp 2007, a bread making learning session with participants from the Garden Web Cooking Forum. I was the teacher and my "students" were from all over: California, Colorado, Michigan, Louisiana, Florida, and North Carolina. Our base camp was a delightful Bed & Breakfast in Oak Ridge, NC which is near Greensboro and very close to the airport. My quilting friend, Marilyn, and her husband Don own the B&B and she has a large kitchen, just right for lots of people making lots of bread.

We began by making a sponge after our kick-off dinner (NC BBQ) followed by Shaker Daily Loaf (a white bread) and Herbed Country French Loaves (using the sponge) the next morning. We continued our baking by making Struan Bread and Classic 100% Whole Wheat Bread. Soft Butter Knot Rolls and Orange Sweet Rolls followed the grain breads. The seven students worked in pairs, taking turns mixing and kneading. I tried my best to help some of them improve their kneading skills - LOL! One class member was a standout at kneading, having made bread regularly years ago. Her breads had a vastly different feel to them which I attributed to her kneading skills.

This group of experienced cooks did a champion job of cleaning up the kitchen every day! And I didn't even have to ask them to clean up or ask that they be quiet while I was talking! Going on field trips was a bit like "herding cats" for me though - LOL!

We went to the Old Mill of Guilford after a lunch break the first baking day. I purchased a few things for the class recipes at that time, but I was very pleased to have organized the class so well that we did not once have to run down the street to the grocery store the entire time - Wednesday evening to Sunday morning.

Thursday night we went to L'Italiano, a very good local Italian restaurant in High Point. Friday we alloted to shopping at the Vietri outlet in Hillsborough, A Southern Season in Chapel Hill (where we had a wonderful lunch at their Weathervane Cafe) and Replacements, Ltd. on I-40/85 near Greensboro. Dinner Friday night was at Blue Water Grille in High Point where we had delicious seafood, fish, and pork.

Saturday began with a morning visit to the NC Farmer's Market nearby. We found lots of vegetables and goat cheese for our pizza lesson that day. We continued class with Focaccia and pizza dough from the Basic Pizza Primer found here at The Fresh Loaf. I asked for questions Saturday afternoon and an hour later we finished up with the Q&A session! We concluded Paney Camp with homemade pizza on Saturday evening.

Our B&B hosts provided a delicous Italian Breakfast Strata (made with our breads) for our brunch on Sunday morning. Two members left for their 11:00 am flight and the other campers went to Old Salem and SECCA in Winston Salem, just a few miles west of the B&B location. All the campers had a chance to pack up bread we had made to take home if they had room. After our fond good-byes, I packed up and came home where I promptly crashed and didn't move for several hours - LOL!

All in all, I think the breadmaking camp and classes went very well. We couldn't do anything about the 100 degree temp heat wave that the whole Southeast and other parts of the nation was experiencing in early August. And...it's supposed to get up to 100 again today. Even though the B&B had A/C, it was about 85 in the kitchen with the ovens going all day. We did change our plans to go shopping after my friend at the Goat Lady Dairy called and said it was miserably hot there and they had no A/C in their cheese tasting room. Our planned trip to the potteries around Seagrove was also canceled due to the heat. But as the camp teacher/tour guide, I just went with the flow of what the campers wanted to do and everything was fine. I did make sure to call ahead and cancel our visits to the Dairy and the pottery where I had scheduled a demonstration.

Last year's camp was Canning Camp in Michigan, where the campers learned to can and make jams, salsa, etc. Next year may be Pastry Camp, but the location has not been set yet. In two years....maybe cooking classes in Italy??? I am soooo getting ready for that one!

Teresa, the "Doughmaster" (the name the campers gave me)

Decided to bake a cake today, along with my weekly rye bread. :)Here is the "Chocolate Double Layer Cake"


And it's Rye Bread day:


And I keep wondering why I've gained 15 lbs. in a year!!! UGH

Luv4Country Soaps
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Is anyone else having issues with how the forum is displaying? It looks like the server reverted to an earlier point and changed the image space allocation. Floyd isn't logged in so he probably isn't aware.

Eric