David Esq.'s blog

Following Chad Robertson's recipe, in Tartine, I made a fantastic walnut bread last night.  It is super delicious plain this morning. Not sure if I would make sandwiches on it or not but I suppose I will find out soon.  I used 200 grams of white whole wheat and 800 grams of all purpose.  I burned a bunch of the walnuts (or at least I think they were too dark) so these loaves don't have the full 3 cups but as you can see there are plenty of nuts in the crumb.

As an exercise I created a spreadsheet for Diagram 3, Part II "Rustic Sourdough with Three Flours, a Cracked Wheat Soaker and a Yeasted Preferment.

I have no idea if it will be of any use to anybody, but here is the google doc link if you are interested.

Diagram 3

The only difference is that I used grams instead of kg, though that is easily changed if people find that annoying.

Being new to the world of bread making, I don't like to keep my starter neglected in the fridge for more than a week, and I do like to see it fed and doubling in size so I can predictably bake a loaf as the need arises.

Like many people who maintain a sourdough starter, I occasionally have more starter than I have time or need for baking bread. 

If you love pancakes and happen to have a Blendtec blender... try the pioneer pancake recipe.  They are really quite delicious and you can't really make a simpler pancake.  I don't know if this would work in a regular blender or not.

The above breads were made with the same recipe. As I have written before, I was looking for a good sandwich loaf.  The trouble with the round bread is that it is a pain to cut into sandwich size pieces.  The trouble with baking a "white bread" that I have had is that it is so soft that it is a pain to cut into slices without the bread crumbling.

So I was making some bread for the holidays and I decided to try using scissors to make my cuts since I had little success using a knife. I am still contemplating buying a razor.  But this is what I got with my shears...nothing fancy. The top left was basically an octagon or circle cut. He top right was intended to be a square and the bottom was a simple snip in the center and a second perpendicular snip in the middle.  

So, now that I am nearly a novice bread maker and able to make a loaf of bread almost from memory,* I decided it is time to stretch my wings and see if I can make the bread in my Lodge loaf pan.

So, this time I again dumped the entire leaven into the water (it floated nicely), but then remembered I was only supposed to use 200 grams of it, so I scooped out enough to leave 200 grams in, and followed the recipe to a "T", sort of.

First, despite what others have said, the author definitely contemplates "turning" the dough more than 4 times (i.e., every 30 minutes the first two hours), and so I turned at the end of the third hour for a total of 5 turns.

Following the KAF sourdough pretzel recipe, combined with the two minute baking soda bath recommended in their regular soft flour pretzel recipe, in order to get the golden brown finish.

They came out nice -- although I baked them at a higher temperature since the oven was already at 450 for my Tartine loaf that I had baked.  I lowered the temperature but did not wait for the temperature to lower before putting the pretzels in the oven.

The baking bug bit me about six weeks ago.  Started with banana bread, baked two loaves of yeasted bread in my lodge cast iron loaf pans, moved on to making pizzas and then tried my hand at sourdough -- ciabatta, english muffins and english muffin bread and even a "basis sourdough loaf" that I read about in a Jane Harrison's "An EasyGuide to Sourdough" which contains weird volume measurements: 2 cups of flour, 1.5 cups starter, 3/4 tsp of sale.   No added water in the recipe but always needed to add water in order to form a dough.