Catch up

I'm sure almost no one has passed by this blog, but as it was initially intended as a means for me to document and take notes on my development as a sourdough baker, I am ashamed at the lack of updates here. Since the beginning of all of this, I haven't taken a break of more than one week from working with the New Zealand culture I woke up way back in June 2009. Looking over these previous entries, I laugh at how deflated and strange my old boules looked. I am not going to be humble about it; I've gotten pretty good with baking sourdoughs, thanks, in short, to perseverance in the pursuit of good bread without commercial yeast.

My latest sourdough experiment was a potato rosemary recipe that used a commercial yeast starter, but I used my still developing skills to adapt the recipe for my starter, and it came out great. I used blue potatoes (and the cooking water) in an attempt to make it a noticeable shade of blue, but it turned out rather normal, ruining the marketing brainstorm session I had while mashing the potatoes up before adding to the dough.

ALSO, a breakthrough for me has been using my dutch oven to bake the breads. I preheat it along with the oven and drop the dough into it, close the lid, and then after about 20 minutes insert my probe thermometer and remove the lid. Otherwise, I just follow the same procedures as always, and the breads have way more spring and look amazing!

A lot of my breads have been at least photographically documented, but instead of trying to find as many different loaves as I can in all of my photos, here is a photo of the sourdough I think came out the best of recent baking sessions. I added some crushed garlic I sauteed briefly in olive oil, my favorite variation so far for sourdough.