Hey bread heads,
Do you flavor your breads? I love a good, pure sourdough but I also love add-ins for variety. Here are some of my favorites.
Walnut raisin whole wheat
Walnut whole wheat
Walnut olive
Olive rosemary
Curry cheddar onion
Cheddar jalapeno
Any other suggestions?
Hey bread heads!
Look what happened to me.
I TOLD YOU that the Flour Water Salt Yeast cookbook has you making a lot of levain. This was the leftover after making the bread! Obvi it wasn’t to the top when I put in the fridge.
Of course I had just cleaned the fridge the day before. But actually, that made it easier to clean up the mess.
Sourdough waffles were in order. Which, btw, I have improved upon. Here is the recipe I use, and I add two overripe bananas, some cinnamon, and some vanilla.
Now that I’ve made the waffles, I have a reasonable amount of starter for my next bread baking adventure.
Hey bread heads,
Do you have a favorite bread cookbook?
I’ve been baking from Tartine Bread, by Chad Robertson, and Flour Water Salt Yeast, by Ken Forkish.
Tartine was what set me off on sourdough baking. I went to buy a loaf of Tartine bread at the Whole Foods near my office and IT WAS $11! I splurged and the loaf was amazing. I didn’t want to go back to packaged supermarket bread (anyone who uses the expression “best thing since sliced bread” has never tasted a Tartine loaf) but $11 a loaf was not sustainable given that toast and coffee is the mainstay breakfast in my household. So I learned how to bake Tartine bread instead.
The cookbook is less about recipes and more about teaching you the method for making sourdough. I studied that thing like the Talmud and also watched some YouTube videos so I felt very prepared to bake my first sourdough.
Flour Water Salt Yeast covers a lot of the same ground, but it gives a variety of recipes. You can assess how much time you have and pick the recipe that best suits your schedule.
Although the techniques in both books are more or less the same, there are some differences which kind of drives me crazy. I kind of want there to be a right answer. Here are some of the differences (and forgive me because things are going to get wonky):
1) FWSY has you making so much levain, much of which you end up discarding (or using for waffles, per my last post). Tartine has you making a more reasonable amount of levain. I’m not quite sure why FWSY calls for the quantity that they do but they must have their reason.
2) Tartine lets you add the levain to the water before adding the flour, while FWSY has you add the levain with the salt after autolysing. It’s much easier to add to the water because it’s easier to fully blend. When you add after autolyse, it’s the same color as the dough so it’s hard to tell if it’s fully blended.
3) Tartine has you make the levain the night before baking, while FWSY has you made the levain in the morning and then the final dough 6-8 hours later. Depending on the recipe you choose, you’re either doing bulk fermentation or proofing overnight. I prefer making the levain in the morning since truth be told, I usually forget to make it the night before.
4) FWSY doesn’t call for bench rest after dividing the loaves.
There are other minor differences, like proof seam up vs. seam down, and slashing vs. no slashing. Bottom line, they are both fine cookbooks. You can’t go wrong with either, or both. I like triangulation.
A word about an “also ran.” I checked out The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. This is a beautiful book with a lot of recipes for basically every type of bread you could want to make. In contrast to the other books I’ve mentioned, this book focuses more on recipes than technique, but it does describe technique as well. However, I ended up not baking any of the recipes for two reasons – they call for kneading and for baking on a stone. Both totally normal and reasonable techniques for bread baking. But I’ve gotten so used to the sourdough method of folds rather than kneading and baking in my Dutch oven.
I would be neglectful if I didn’t mention the Cheese Board Collective Works cookbook, which I’ve had and baked from for many years, way before I got into sourdough baking. The Cheese Board is an amazing bakery that I never neglect to visit when I’m in the Bay Area. Now, I don’t tend to follow their recipes, but I take their flavor combinations and add them to my sourdough recipe. Cheddar curry onion bread? Yes please. My husband would be happy if I made that every week.
I’d be happy to hear your favorites.
Happy baking, GEG (aka Good Enough Gourmet)
So this happened yesterday morning.
I looked in the fridge to see how my proofing loaves were doing and I saw that my sourdough starter was about to overflow so I did the only responsible thing – make sourdough discard waffles.
It being Sunday and grocery day, I didn’t have any milk so I used water. Ew, I know but with all that starter plus some melted butter, I figured it wouldn’t be wanting for flavor. Also, my waffle iron was stored deep in the recesses of my pantry since I don’t make waffles often.
I’m not even going to give you the recipe because truth be told, they weren’t that great. I should have added fruit, or cinnamon or something. Still it was fun to have waffles for a change.
I have moved my waffle iron to someplace more accessible so I can work on improvements. After all, I always have tons of discard and feel bad throwing away (even if it is called discard).
In answer to yesterday’s question about how forgiving bread baking is, when I had forgotten to feed my starter for two days in a row but decided to proceed anyway, I am happy to say, it worked! Bread baking is forgiving after all.
Here’s the finished product.
Hey bread heads,
We’re about to find out how forgiving breadmaking is. I forgot to feed my sourdough starter for the past TWO days, but I decided to make bread today anyway. I figured that making the levain would fix things. Isn’t levain just starter on steroids?
I’m going to proof overnight so we’ll see tomorrow how it turns out. The only other complicating factor is that I’m baking whole wheat bread with walnuts and raisins, which I don’t normally make. So if it doesn’t come out right, I’ll never know whether it was the lack of feeding the starter or the whole wheat.
So far, it looking pretty good so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
Report back tomorrow, GEG (aka Good Enough Gourmet)
The Good Enough Gourmet 