Blog posts

I've been  making bread for a while. Yesterday for the first time, I saw the dough cracking while beeing fermented and proofed. Never had that problem before. All the steps I took yesterday have been done before, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it happened (well maybe because of mixing, but not sure). I took pictures of the process and I will post them.

The recipe: Starter (very active), flour (70%), Rye flour (30%), Water, Salt. Hydration was 68%. I've baked with hydration levels before ranging from 60% to 85%.

This is Ramona proudly showing her first ever loaves. Nobody in her family has ever made bread this way. Mexico is not a country where loaves would have been easily accesible some years ago. The corn tortilla reigns. This is now changing with more people having access to stoves, and wheat.

Ramona has now cooked bread at her mothers home in Macuspana. She is eager to learn and cant wait to experiment with the loaves .

This is a puffed up roti that we cooked at Sabrina's. This puffing is what you want when cooking roti.

In preperation  of the "times loaf experiment tomorrow,
we went to "el centro" (downtown) to a store known for its selection of enamel pots. I bought a wonderful 4 qt. baby blue one with lid and a handle for the equivalent of $7 US.  There were larger ones that may have been 20qt pots for 17 US dollars.

So I set out today to try the new technique that we've been discussing from the New York Times article. I created a dough like what he described the night before and gave it an 18 hour rise.

I made a multigrain bread a weekend or two ago:

I made a porridge of grains the night before. Oats, millet, quinoa, polenta, and anything else I could find.

I added all of that to a simple dough. Slightly sweetened with honey, softened with some milk and oil

I used the starter than I have been carefully feeding since last thursday night. All indications were right, smell, bubbles etc..and baked somethng that looked great, and felt like a doorstop. It was a VERY dense loaf, not what I would choose to have again. So I fed the starter and popped it into the fridge...perhaps I will try again next week.

Well the sourdough is now into the fridge for the next phase of folding every hour for the next four or five hours. I will then leave it overnight on the lower shelf inthe fridge.

It seems like a surprisingly small loaf given all of the work on the starter..which began last Thursday. I have put the remainder into the fridge after feeding and will use it again next week, should this loaf work....if not, I am going back to tried and true recipes...and the trusty cottage loaf from the weekend.

I started this starter on thursday evening, and this morning I noticed a subtle change in the smell, for the better. The harsh sour smell had gone .

I poured off all the top forming houch and have been feeding it faithfully every 8 hours. Today I think I finally have enough bubbles to make the dough tomorrow and bake the bread on wednesday morning.

Ramona also tried making two loaves at her families home over the weekend. Only one of the two loaves rose and one of her children touched a loaf on its final rise and probably punctured the surface.