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This weekend I baked a loaf that used to be a family favorite and always is successful. It is a soft white bread recipe that is punched down once and then pinched into walnut sized pieces, dipped in garlic butter and layered in a tube pan. I added sauteed chanterelle mushroom and green olive muffuletta between the layers with the italian herbs and cheeses.

Herb Bubble Loaf

My goal; to improve upon the Sourdough No Knead ala JMonkey and Susan adding only the overnight proof in the refrigerator and hopefully improving the "nice slashing on top". The result; I managed to bake a couple of weird looking loaves with unremarkable crumb. I thought I would make two batches of no knead testing the old starter against the new starter. In my mind any differences would be incremental. Wrong.

After looking at several other blogs showing amazing sourdough results, I'm feeling really envious!    My starter experiment is dying a slow, horrible death. (If figures that the 3 other starters I have took off in no time at all, but the one I share with everyone tanks!!)   I fed the starters again trying a reduced amount of flour and water to see if anything will change.  If not, I'm going to toss both of them and start over.

I began my sourdough journey last week on the 16th. My starter was active on day 2, died down and remained quiet until day 6. I fed it over those two days to make sure it was alive and kicking and it looked great. each time with in feeds it doubled even trippled and I decided yesterday that I was going to start my first sourdough loaf. I followed reinhearts baasic sourdough from BBA and put the starter (biga type I dont know the word) in the fridge over night. Took it out this morning, and began my permentation. I was so excited to see it grow to much.

Hello there, flour-heads,

This weekend I made my usual sourdough, but added the extra step of retarding it in the fridge after 4 stretch & fold cycles. It was in there for 19 hours. Then I let it warm up for 2.5 hours, shaped it, rested it for 30 minutes, slashed and baked. It's a two sponge recipe that I began on Friday morning and finished baking about midday Sunday. It has the best tang of any I've made so far -- wouldn't really call it sour, but a nice lingering aftertaste.

Yesterday morning I was busy feeding starters and I recalled some recent mentions on the forum about using the excess starter instead of discarding it. I decided to quickly put twice the amount I normally use (100g) into a bowl and start a soaker for later. My starter was very happy, bubbling away and smelled great! So I weighed out 200g and finished feeding the boys.

We're having fun now! The bread baking mentors of this community have been so generous with their advice and encouragement. It's starting to come together in my kitchen. I baked a sourdough no knead using notes by JMonkey and Susan this week and here is the result-

Dutch Oven Sourdough