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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. 

It was a bread making marathon for me this weekend as I experimented with Jeffrey Hamelman's 70% Rye sourdough using the Detmolder 3 stage method and tried shaping some of Richard Bertinets Fougasse and Epis. Pictures in

http://www.angelfire.com/planet/tomsbread/index.htm

I have tried posting pictures into this site but it still eludes me :(

Tomsbread

Well we just made our annual trek from the Chicago area down to Fort Myers where we will ride out the winter until May. I am into day 5 of a pineapple juice/whole wheat flour sourdough system and so far, so good. Today I made Floyd's rustic bread recipe again and it turned out very good. What I really want to talk about is a new tool, which I haven't seen mentioned by anyone else. That is, an electric knife.

Today I have tried a new recipe. It is from the "great british kitchen" website and is called cottage loaf: recipeand photo as follows:

Recently I baked the following bread with chickpea flour. This recipe is my own creation. The chickpea flour gives the bread a light sweet taste.

100 g chickpea flour
150 g white flour
5 g fresh yeast
~110 g water
1 TL honey
5 g salt
50 g refreshed sourdough

Life finally caught up with me and the taking of pictures hasbeen set aside until I manage to figure out what th problem is with my uploading pictures...the good news is I have more time for experimenting with the favorite recipes (to your left).

I made the cinnamon raison oatmeal cluster , but prefer my original recipe which is a version of "white bread from the Joy of cooking cookbook". 

I had ambitious goals for the weekend. I'd try a sourdough version of the whole-wheat ciabatta, try the "stretch-n'-fold, no-knead' technique with my weekly sourdough, and make a pizza, using regular yeast.

We had plans with friends for a mud oven pizza party, and the weather was extremely cooperative. A lovely fall afternoon! We built our mud oven this spring/summer following Kiko Denzer's book, and after a few runs I'm now getting the hang of baking with it.