Recipes

[gardenman]

Everything's still going well. I bought a glass container for the starter yesterday since some sites say it can eat the plastic of plastic containers due to increasing acidity. (I'm not sure I believe that, but whatever.) There's lots of advice on weighing the container and then subtracting that from the weight each day and doing all kinds of crazy math to get everything right, but my digital scale also reads in the negative and since I know I have four ounces of starter, two ounces from the previous day plus one ounce of fresh flour and one ounce of fresh water each day when I start, I'm simply zeroing out the scale and removing two ounces of old starter, leaving minus two ounces of starter (the old zero minus two equals minus two routine) then adding in the one ounce of fresh flour and one ounce of fresh water to zero out the scale again and there should be four ounces of starter in the container. It's much easier than having to do all of the calculations some recommend each day. For the record my container weighs one pound three and five-eights ounces empty, so the math would be a tick tedious to do each day.

A lot of people seem intent on making a starter and keeping a sourdough starter into rocket science, but it's really not that hard. Hopefully next week this time the starter will be fully developed and ready for bread. Then on Friday I'll mix the bread. Do the autolyse. Do the multiple folds of the dough through the course of the day to develop the gluten, then preshape, then final shaping, then place it in the bannetons, and then refrigerate it overnight. Then Saturday morning let one loaf come to room temp an hour ahead of the other and preheat the oven and bake first one, then the other.  It should be a pretty quick and easy bake Saturday morning then let it cool for an hour or two (the hard part of bread making) and enjoy it.

[AuntMame]

Thanks for the update Gardenman! I look forward to reading your progress. 

[gardenman]

So far, so good. The latest photo of it is below. The blue line is where it was when I fed it this morning at around 7:30 AM ET. Now at about 12:30 PM ET (five-ish hours later) it's nearly double. I'm going to start giving it two feedings a day given its growth at this stage. The plan is to have it ready to go next Friday, then an overnight rise in the fridge and baked sometime Saturday morning. It looks good, smells good, is behaving well, and everything seems to be on track.

[gardenman]

Made up the first bread dough today and will bake it tomorrow. I'm still a bit lost with handling the high hydration doughs. The six foldings went great. Dividing the dough was fine. Pre-shaping the first loaf went perfectly. The rolling and tucking soon had a nice shiny taut skin over the dough. The other half of the dough didn't cooperate at all. I used the exact same techniques and it just stayed a gloppy mess for most of the time. I eventually got it somewhat pre-shaped with a bit of a skin and said, "Close enough!" After twenty minutes it was time for the final shaping and placing into the bannetons. The first half of the dough cooperated moderately well, not as good as the pre-shaping, but still better than the second dough. The second one just refused to cooperate at all and more or less ended up getting poured into the banneton. Both loaves now rest in the fridge until around ten tomorrow morning when I'll bake them off. I'm not expecting dough two to hold its form at all, and it may become more of a flatbread, but we'll see. It should taste good anyway.

I'm not sure if I'm not using enough water on my table and hands while trying to shape the dough, or too much. I'll watch a few more YouTube videos before trying to form a high hydration dough again. Nothing I tried worked on the second half of the dough. it just refused to form a skin and hold its shape. The exact same dough from the same bowl and both halves behaved completely differently just minutes apart. I'll study up some more before the next go round. There's something there I'm missing.