Floydm's blog

I'm still feeding my starter. Pretty amazing separation: But there is still activity. I'm not sure if that is hooch (an alcoholic by-product of fermentation) on top or if it is just water that separated out because it was so thin. I thought about tasting it, but then figured that might not be such a good idea. I fed it again today, this time a bit more flour and a bit less water to try to stiffen it up some.

There are signs of life in my new starter. I fed it more whole wheat flour and water again today. On that note, I saw a professional baking blog post that irked me yesterday. Basically, when faced with a simple question about starters by an enthusiast new baker, Rose punts and says "it is too hard to explain to you.

I am trying to start another sourdough starter. I started it a couple of days ago. I looked at SourdoLady's starter recipe but didn't have any pineapple juice in the house, so I began with 1/3 cup whole wheat flour, 1/3 cup water, and a half a capful of apple cider vinegar. Day two (today) I added 1/3 cup water and 1/3 cup rye flour. I'm not seeing any signs of activity yet, but neither of the flours are particularly fresh so I may not have enough wild yeast in them to get started.

Tonight we are baking cookies for Santa. Lebkuchen and Sour Cream Sugar Cookies, two recipes that "Santa" is particularly fond of. :)

For my weekly batch of French bread, I tried autolyse again. This time I successfully combined it with a poolish. My overnight sponge was 8 ounces bread flour, 8 ounces water, and 1/8 teaspoon of instant yeast. My autolyse the next day was 10 ounces of water and 8 ounces of flour. I let that soak for 20 minutes, then mixed in the poolish along with 1 tablespoon salt and 1 heaping teaspoon instant yeast.

I'm back from Texas. Afraid I didn't find the time to go bakery hunting. The closest thing to an artisan bakery I found was the Au Bon Pain sandwich shop in the DFW airport. I did get to try one of the cakes from Collin Street Bakery, their pecan apricot cake. I'm not a fruit cake fan, but I have to admit it was darn good. Glad to see that folks were able to help each other out here while I was out.

Since we had another half a pot of soup leftover for dinner, I tried the autolyse approach again today (see yesterday's post). Much better results this time. My dough was real basic again:

13 ounces bread flour 9 to 10 ounces water 2 teaspoons salt 1 heaping teaspoon active dry yeast (activated in 1 ounce of the water for 5 minutes).

I changed my technique a bit. I mixed the bread flour (all I had in the house) and 9 ounces of the water together in a bowl until the flour was all moist.

I, too, had a doughy disaster today. I was trying to make a simple French/Italian bread using both a poolish (a wet, yeasted, overnight pre-ferment) and an autolyse (a flour and water quick pre-ferment). The poolish was too wet, the autolyse too dry, and when I tried to mix them together I could not get the chunks of autolyse dough to combine with poolish. It ended up having the consistency of chicken and dumplings.

Today I baked the baguettes with Pâte Fermenté and the Roasted Potato Bread from Hamelman's Bread book. The potato loaves are the round ones with the fendu style crease. I love how Hamelman gives advice on how one should shape hundreds of fendu style loaves, but very little advice for the home baker. Typical of him: great recipes, but he rarely bothers helping out the novices.

We had the buttermilk rolls on the Thanksgiving table. They were wonderful. I'm trying to finish our can of coffee as quickly as I can so that I can use it to try baking a Panettone. In the meantime, I'll probably bake another batch or two of stollen and some of my family's Christmas cookies. We going to visit family in Texas in a couple of weeks. Supposedly Texas is where fruit cake originated.