Dark rye, and the one bake I cannot rush
A 70% rye loaf with coffee and treacle that needs a full day in the tin before you cut it, which is the hardest instruction in baking.
Tagged “sourdough”
11 posts. All tags
The first proper loaf from the new starter
Ten weeks after starting a culture from rye flour and tap water, it finally made a loaf I would give to someone else. Notes on what changed.
A light rye for spring, and someone else's proving basket
A 40% rye tin loaf for a starter that is barely three weeks old, plus a time-lapse of a rye dough doing what mine does too slowly to watch.
Starting over with a new starter
My old sourdough culture died over the winter. Beginning again with rye flour, tap water and a jar on the radiator shelf.
Morris
The starter I had kept going for years finally gave up in the cold kitchen. A short note on what happened, what I should have done, and some bread without any starter at all.
Stollen, with Morris doing some of the work
A Christmas stollen raised partly with the starter, written out in baker's percentages, with notes on why rich dough is slow and what I got wrong last year.
Morris goes in the fridge for the summer
At 28 °C in the kitchen my starter peaks in three hours and collapses by lunchtime, so he has been moved to the fridge and onto a weekly schedule.
A Mischbrot, after watching someone else's kitchen
A German-style mixed rye and wheat loaf at 40% rye, worked out after watching a home-baking video filmed in a kitchen as small and untidy as mine.
A brick, with notes
The same recipe I have baked two hundred times came out dense, pale and flat. The kitchen was 16 °C and I followed the clock instead of the dough.
The everyday loaf, written down properly
The plain sourdough I bake most weeks, at 75% hydration with 10% wholemeal, finally recorded in percentages so I stop reconstructing it from memory.
Morris, and a rye starter filmed by someone else
My starter is older than some of my cutlery and I have never once watched it rise. Someone on Wikimedia Commons filmed theirs for ten hours.