First off, 2000 words.
The complete story. With all the great help I've had at The Fresh Loaf, I managed a pretty good hot weather sourdough loaf last time. My notes then suggested giving the shaped loaves longer at room temperature and scoring more resolutely, and so at the first possible o...
Tunneling hither and yon through the internets I have been learning more and more about sourdough fermentation and why my bread hasn’t been too pretty of late. Advice suggested that I feed the starter with strong flour, reduce the amount of starter to 10% and slow the whole process down by using t...
I thought I had solved my bread problem, and had high hopes for my most recent batch, 1 but it was not to be. The dough was just incredibly sticky. Not slack, sticky. It clung tenaciously to hands, bowl, scraper, worktop; I really felt completely unable to manipulate it. I did, gingerly and with extra flour, manage to form a sphere of sorts and to plop that, upside down, into a little basket I bought at the local plant nursery. Lined with a clean towel and liberally dusted with flour.
First thing I did on getting back from hols was to wake the sleeping sourdough and then set to. I was determined to produce a better loaf, despite the heat: over 30℃ in the kitchen by day, and nowhere else much cooler. Step one was to find a stronger flour. I’d always used Barilla 00, which is about...
Although I promised to, I never did deal with the baking session that produced, as a byproduct, the Best. Pancakes. Evah. Probably because it was too awful to revisit. The dough -- supposedly 65% hydration -- had absolutely no structure.
Really, only a vague dread of wasting food persuaded me...
