A couple of months ago (my the time flies), when I was spending the month on Whiskey, I went on a little bit of an ice sidetrack. Truthfully, the sidetrack hasn’t stopped and I’ve become rather obsessed with having the perfect ice for cocktails. It first started with having perfectly clear ice which I was mildly successful…
Making the pizza
I feel bad – its April 9th and this is my first real post of the month. Sigh. Life gets busy sometimes I guess. However – not all is lost. I’ve made some progress on some long running projects from previous months so I guess it’s not all bad (more on that soon). The goal…
April – Pizza
To be honest, April had been slated for something else. However – after doing bread last month it occurred to me that it might make sense to move pizza up since pizza is… well… mostly bread. I love making (and eating) pizza and I’ve had rather good luck making it in the past. I used…
End of Month 3 summary
As month 3 comes to a close I feel pretty good about what I was able to accomplish. I made a lot of bread and towards the end really felt like I was getting the hang of it all. There were some problems I ran into with the starter and shaping the loaves but I…
Some improvement in height of the loaves
The bread tonight turned out better than I had expected considering that I didn’t really follow the instructions very closely. I sort of last track of time and the timing got pretty far off. For instance, the bread only proofed for 90 minutes but sat on the bench for 90 minutes as well. Since Im trying…
Vertically challenged loaves
I’ve baked almost every night this week and while the bread is turning out tasting great, I can’t seem to get the loaves to get any taller. This is the closest I’ve gotten, or at least the tallest. Im not entirely sure what to do differently. Every time I get the bread into the dutch…
My 2nd starter bread
So I used the starter I had made from the ‘Flour Water Salt Yeast’ book and tried it with the recipe from the Tartine book. The bread turned out good! His process is rather different. Namely – you dont really let the dough rise before shaping. Tartine has you mix all of the ingredients, and…
My first starter bread
The starter seems to have really taken off. I was really excited to see that it was starting to look just like it does in the books. When you pulled it apart you could really see that it was forming lots of air pockets like shown below… The first non-yeast (or at least manufactured yeast)…
Making a bread starter take 2 – day 5 and 6
So when I checked my starter again it hadn’t quite risen to where I had expected it to. The directions for day 5 called for removing all but 150 grams of the mix. It also had pictures of what your tub should look like. Mine looked like this… It was essentially the consistency of batter with…