People often criticize the Forkish method of managing one's starter. For example, if you were to make his double-fed sweet levain according to his instructions, you would throw away everything but 50 grams of your starter that you fed 24 hours ago, feed it 250 grams of flour and (200 grams of water) for a total of 450 grams of levain.
This weekend was a "disaster" in terms of baking waste. I don't even recall what I was trying to bake, but I got distracted and used the wrong quantity of water. I determined this because the autolyse was very dry and when I weighed my container it was short by a whole lot. Unfortunately, it was not possible to incorporate the missing water at this point.
Am I the only one who takes some sort of idiotic pride in using the minimum amount of flour to get the job done -- and by job, I mean, having the dough release from the basket without ripping? And by "idiotic pride" I mean, using too little and having my dough stick/rip on occasion because I put it in the basket somewhat sticky instead of adequately floured?
Friday afternoon, I mixed the dough -- again using 50% White Whole Wheat (milled from Praire Gold White Hard Spring Wheat) and 50% Caputo "00" flour. I put the dough balls in the fridge and left for the weekend. On Sunday afternoon, I realized that I was out of canned tomatoes. Fortunately, I had a fresh tomato, and I decided to make my own tomato sauce.
On Friday afternoon, we left for a weekend at the NJ Shore. I had no idea what time I'd be home on Sunday and did not want to try and figure out a way to pre-plan my loaves for a Sunday bake. So, I mixed up some pizza dough and stuck it in the fridge, figuring we could eat it for lunch or dinner on Sunday.
Been baking from Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt & Yeast, and I decided it was time to keep better notes of what I was doing so that I know how to consistently get the bread I love.
Let me start off for the record saying that while this bread is fantastic, I won't be following these procedures again, unless I can't get an equally great bread doing things correctly...
So, I have been following the formula for Roberta's Pizza Dough, as reported in the New York Times. However, after spending a fortune on a flour mill, I could not bring myself to purchase the '00' flour (nor did I find any whenever I was looking for it in the supermarkets).
I scored some Montana Wheat, Prairie Gold Hard White Spring Wheat berries while visiting a friend, and decided to try the Overnight Country Brown with the White Spring Wheat Berries for the whole wheat portion of the formula.
For this bake, to make the levain, at 9:00 p.m. I used 25 grams of my unfed starter (last fed about 10 days prior to making the levain), added 100 grams of AP flour, 100 grams of the milled Prairie Gold, and 100 grams of water.
At 7:00am, I autolysed the 604 grams of AP flour, 276 grams of white wheat, and 684 grams of water.
Because I accidentally melted my 12 Quart Cambro container and wound up baking only a single loaf for my Country Brown, I decided to make a "quick" loaf using the 50% Whole Wheat Biga formula. I ground the flour the night before, made the AP biga the night before, and mixed the dough in the morning.
I used I bulk fermented the dough in the 6-Quart container and, quite frankly, while it was a little small, I did not really miss using the 12 quart container. I wonder if I really need such a big container for making only two loaves of bread.
I decided to bake an Overnight Country Brown bread, out of Ken Forkish's Flour Water Salt & Yeast book.
During the bulk fermentation, I placed my 12-quart Cambro container in the stove, door slightly ajar and light on.
Note to self and others: When using the oven as a proofing box, put a sticky note on whatever button or dial is needed to turn the stove on, that says "Remove contents before using!".
