rushyama's blog

Hello, TFL'ers!

One of my new year's goals was to take a stab at sourdough baguettes and I finally had the chance to give it a try. I followed the recipe / method here with a few modifications:

We've been visiting my parents in the Pacific Northwest over the holidays, and naturally I wanted to bake bread. A friend of mine gave me some of her starter so I've been having some fun experimenting in a different environment using the tools available.

I've been thinking of making a fig and walnut loaf for awhile and finally got around to trying it this week. It turned out very well and it's a formula I'd like to tinker with again.

Notes:

In the spirit of the holidays I've been experimenting a little with enriched sourdough breads. A couple months ago I adapted a TFL formula from txfarmer for sourdough pumpkin hokkaido milk bread. I really love the texture of this style of bread, and have found that if I use the stiff levain quite young (6-8 hours), the resulting tang is barely distinguishable. (If I want more of a tang I'll use the levain when it's around 10-12 hours old.)

It's that time of year when I get a little too squash happy and buy more than I should, so naturally some of it had to be baked into bread. I used Sarah Owens' butternut squash and cherry recipe as a general formula to make one sweet and one savory loaf.

The sweet loaf used roasted butternut squash puree and dried cranberries (I would like to try it with the cherries; I just didn't have any on hand). I just love the color:

I recently found some fresh semolina flour at a local market so I decided to try out the semolina formula in Tartine Bread. This was my first time baking with semolina and I found it to be very pleasant -- the dough smelled almost buttery and was very easy to handle despite the relatively high hydration (~80%).

I stayed fairly true to the recipe, with the following changes:

Hello, TFLers -- I'm a longtime lurker and relatively new sourdough baker. I've learned a lot from this site and am hoping to start logging some of my bakes here to learn even more from some of you!