cranbo's blog

Happened to be in the Bay Area after Christmas this year for a vacation, and was passing through Petaluma on a weekday, so decided to swing by Keith Giusto Bakery Supply, which is tucked into a corner of an industrial park in Petaluma.

11/3/2014: A recent TFL forum post inspired me to think about ways to keep your starter warm. 

Maintaining a warm temperature is extremely important to establishing a new starter. If you maintain your initial starter temperature at 82-86F, this will lead to the production of more lactobacillus than yeast, meaning a more sour/acid environment, which is important to establishing a healthy yeast and bacteria colony in your starter, especially at the beginning. 

When I got more serious about baking several years ago, I created my own spreadsheets (or "breadsheets" as I like to call 'em) where I kept accurate track of formula tweaks, timings, etc. Over 200 sourdoughs, ciabattas, mixed grain pan loaves, pizzas, flatbreads, etc. 

Nowadays, even though I still weigh my ingredients, I "eyeball" things much more, and I rarely write my outcomes down....probably because for the most part, the outcomes come out consistently well. I haven't been baking a ton of breads lately, but my recent go-to's are:

There's quite a few good tutorials on this on TFL, but tons of lousy ones online, but I thought I would add my own. Mine is a bit different than others in that it focuses on maintaining warm temps throughout the starter creation process. I believe this is key to establishing good yeast and bacterial multiplication and a healthy starter ecosystem. It also focuses on just using flour, water, time and temperature to build a starter. No sugar, potatoes, honey, (heaven forbid) commercial yeast, other fancy stuff.

Inspired by a recent thread, I decided to tackle creation of a copycat recipe for Joe's Squared pizza from Baltimore. Anyone want to try it out?

So in response to a recent post, I decided to try Beth Hensperger's Sennebec Hill bread for myself, to see if the original recipe was problematic as I initially suspected. This is an enriched multigrain bread with 3 different flours, as well as rolled oats and yellow cornmeal. 

In response to a thread, I thought I'd start a thread with simple sourdough recipes for beginning sourdough bakers.

The idea is that the recipes are:

• use steps that build upon well-established baking techniques
• forgiving enough if starter hydration is not exactly 100%
• use common ingredients (that you can find at any supermarket)
• use a minimum of ingredients (no more than 7)

The recipe does assume that you have a healthy starter which:

To try to document dough development of a lean dough, I created a video of mixing some lean, 59% hydration dough in my KitchenAid 5qt mixer at speed #2 (the 2nd click). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBZFYzeK1Vo

After being intrigued for a while about it, decided to give it a shot this evening. 

• 1 organic Fuji apple, washed, cored and chopped
• 2 tbsp raisins
• 1 tbsp dried cranberries
• Enough water to just cover

Two questions:

I wanted a quick reference list for dough ball sizes for common items I bake: breads, rolls, pizza. I haven't found one on TFL, maybe it's here, but no luck yet. So I figured I'd share what I have so far.

Pizzas

12" pizza, personal (plate-sized): 175g (thin) - 250g (thicker)
14" pizza, thin crust, NYC style: 450g
14" pizza, medium "american" crust style: 540g
16" pizza, thin crust, NYC style: 567g

Sourdough and Rustic Loaves