Rajan Shankara's blog

...just kidding, there's no butter sandwich. But, I baked another loaf this morning. I made A LOT of starter for some reason, and went on a long weekend. The levain was put in the fridge and three days later it was a pile of bubbly mush. 

"I'm tired of believing I need to ferment sourdough with a fresh levain.." I thought to myself. So, I decided to bake a loaf of bread with 3 day old, cold levain—without refreshing it one little bit. 

I stuck with a safe 75% hydration recipe of mine and trusted my beast of a starter. 

Hey gang. I made some sourdough pizza for my lady the other night, and as I was making the dough I said to myself, "I'm going to make some bread!"

I wanted to raise the hydration level of my basic loaf up a notch, from 75 to 77, and I had extra levain so I decided to add more for flavor and punch by going from 18% to 20% of the total, AND I decided to keep the normal timing of the batch. 

I love frying my starter! Plop that baby into a sizzling oily pan and you've got fried sourdough. 

For lunch, I decided to take some extra starter and make a sandwich. 

In the pan is a salmon burger with blackened garlic, onion and rosemary. The kitchen had some extra basil so I plucked a few leaves and threw em in!

Well I took a few years off there! Hey everyone, nice to see the pros still baking on TFL. I have learned so much from you guys over the years. 

I am baking again now that I'm settled in San Jose, California, and no longer a monk. Let's get to what you want to know...

I tried to start my own starter without luck! Even after 5 different test trials with all different flours and two types of water... so a neighbor luckily shared some healthy bugs with me because I was getting impatient. (Monks get impatient???)

Got some einkorn flour recently and did a small bake, good stuff! Easy to work with and pretty much like white flour, nothing like whole wheat with bran included. Good taste, cool color and mouthfeel. Going to add einkorn to my whole wheat batches, maybe 30%. 

Recipe was 100% einkorn flour, 50% hydration, 100% hydration levian, a litte oil. 2 hour autolyse, because.

The Zen part of baking is the fact that you can't alter every part of an artisan loaf—although you can get close. Eventually the rise and opening of the loafs seam will go its own way and run off in the direction it sees fit. A baker can only control so much before the bake, but once the yeast begin to heat up and ebullition of CO2 is accelerated we can only relax and be happy with what they decided to do. After hundreds of bakes we finally learn to let the loaf decide what artisanal and craft really mean. Defining it ourselves is like telling someone how to interpret Vincent Gogh.

It's been a while! Over the past month I have been baking on a regular schedule and trying out a new recipe every bake and just having tons of fun. Let's see if I can quickly recap some breads—all 100% whole wheat sourdough of varying hydrations. 

85% WW Jalapeno Cheddar and Sun Dried Tomato SD!

This bread was so much fun, and awesome tasting. Spicy when you got a pepper!

Lot's of baking as usual. Our sourdough culture is being fed twice a day and enjoys that. Besides always having starter available for baking on a whim, one can really get to observe how their culture is behaving as it rises and falls everyday. I have clocked mine at 8 hours of work and it begins to fall; this is at a very low amount of starter with each refresh too, 10g SD to 70g flour 70g water. The consistency also changes enough to see where you want to be for baking and where you have gone too far.

Baking lots. 

Regular SD WW loaves, seeded loaves and blackberry pecan loaves. Also did my fourth batch of yeasted Pain au Chocolat, which need some serious help. I can't get them to ferment and flake. 

Rye Ciabatta with ground flax. These were superb tasting. 

Blackberry Pecan WW SD loaves. Blackberry isn't all that great tasting. Sure looks nice though. 

Tuesday's gone with the wind, along with 3 of my favorite loaves yet. 

 I was inspired by a recipe from The Perfect Loaf and decided it was time to change up my routine and add some more stuff to my dough. These loaves can only be appreciated by a baker. I feel like something has changed in my baking and it seems to have all come from this one bake. Have you ever felt that way? As if this is some kind of turning point and I see a bright baking future ahead.