Day 7 (Morning): Man vs. Machine

Ah, confidence. I was brimming with it. Even though this was technically over Ed Wood's estimated 3-5 days of activation (it was 5 days, 12.5 hours after I started, to be exact), I was invincible on the morning of Day 7. Here is what awaited me in my room temperature proofing box at around 9am:

This has about 1 1/4 inches of net growth since the last feeding 12 hours before, but I've found that after a culture it reaches peak frothiness, it falls back into itself somewhat

Admit it, you kind of want to dive in

Just wanted to try and capture the consistency here

I decided that I'd better officially check to see if my cultures would pass Ed Wood's test of 2-3 inches of volume increase within 3 hours, so I set an alarm for noon and started another feeding frenzy.

Come on, yeasties! Dinner's on!

Note the pink line. This is the "before" shot.

While I waited, I started to peruse my other bread resources, Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice and King Arthur Flour's Whole Grain Baking. I was greatly disturbed to find that the method's in both books were much different than those provided by Ed Wood. For example, in the KAF book, there were a series of steps to take every 20 minutes for the day of baking. Pulling, folding--stuff I vaguely remember seeing in the bread episode of Good Eats, but had for some reason totally dismissed from memory. How had I forgotten to study! All I had was a little booklet that wasn't even that well written! In Ed Wood's now seemingly poor instructions, there were just FOUR steps total. I will sum them up now:

1. Mix all the ingredients together and wait 12 hours.
2. Mix the dough again for a minute and then wait 3-4 hours.
3. Bake.
4. Cool.

It seems that the recipes in the booklet are aimed at bakers using bread machines, so of course the steps can be simplified as there is a machine to do the bulk of the work. But I found it rather annoying, since A) I don't have a bread machine and B) I'm trying to create a legitimate, back to basics kind of bread here, and relying on technology seemed, to be frank, pathetic. Ed Wood, as grateful as I am to him for having a site where one can obtain a great variety of cultures, had pitted man against machine, and seemed okay with the idea of just letting the machine win. So, without a bread machine, or even instructions on how to proceed with my soon to be born dough, I decided to wing it. Instead of studying Peter Reinhart's book, a renowned source for all things bread, I skimmed the basic steps and images in the KAF book and spent the remainder of the 3 hours getting some work done for my work at home job. Everything would be fine, I kept telling myself.

And so, it seemed, everything would. Taken around 12pm: