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| Success! |
Dearest
Readers,
Behold
my beautiful loaf of home-made white bread–warm, crusty, aromatic, and earthy. It’s been a two-month journey of
trial and error, several failures and adjustments to bread recipes to arrive at
this successful loaf.
I love
bread. Good bread. It’s comfort food from my childhood. Living in New Jersey as
a youngster in the 50’s, my Dad brought home crunchy deli Kaiser rolls, and
long loaves of Italian bread. Mom refused to buy the fluffy white brands of
sliced bread, allowing only Pepperidge Farm. When we moved to Rutland, Vermont
in 1962, Mom often bought bakery bread.
Here’s my
rocky journey to this golden loaf:
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| King Arthur Flour Education Center, Bakery, Cafe, and Store |
September
15: I took a 3-hour sourdough class at King Arthur Flour Baking School in Norwich VT.
Sharon O’Leary
at King Arthur, demonstrates how to mix, handle, form, knead and bake
sourdough.
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| Grab, lift, flop and turn the autolyse (first mixing of the ingredients) |
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| Folding ends of dough into the center after first rising |
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| Hands on experience in rolling the dough into a ball |
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| Placing the pre-folded dough in cloth lined bowls to rise again |
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| Shaping the dough into batards (and round shapes) |
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| The class's final baked round sourdough loaves |
Each of
us in the class leaves with a loaf we baked, a small amount of starter culture
and the phase 1 batch of dough we mixed.
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| First mix of sourdough ingredients and the starter culture |
Sept.
16th: I begin my car trip back to Georgia with the dough and culture
in a cooler in the car.
Sept.
23: I leave Brooklyn heading south again. It dawns on me in Delaware that I’ve
forgotten the culture, the preliminary dough, and the cooler in my daughter’s apartment
in Brooklyn.
Around
Oct. 1st I email King Arthur Flour’s help site and they send me
another starter culture via UPS free of charge. The living blob of wild yeast
and flour arrives healthy, and happily ready to grow.
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| New batch of sourdough starter culture |
Three
tries at making my own sourdough bread ends in flat failures, sticky dough and a
final tough culture starter. I did something wrong!
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| sourdough bread #1-flat and misshapen |
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| sourdough #2-barely rising |
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| sourdough #3-sticky and tough |
I
release from my mind the romantic notion of maintaining a live, friendly sourdough culture in my fridge that I will feed weekly
with flour. Goodbye idea!
Friend
and bread baker Julie Puttgen sent me a link to a delicious no-knead bread
recipe that she used to make a couple of round loaves when I visited her home in
Lebanon, NH this summer. It's cooked in a dutch oven in the oven:
I
adjusted this recipe three times, trying, and finally succeeding at the right proportion
of ingredients. Maybe altitude has something to do with the necessary changes???
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| No-knead bread #1-flat and small |
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| No-knead bread dough #2-rising nicely |
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| No-knead bread dough #2-second rising on a smooth towel per the recipe |
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| Scraping off the dough from the second rising stuck on the cloth |
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| No-knead bread #2-tiny loaf due to so much dough stuck on the towel |
During the preparation for Bread #3, my oven dies, but my
neighbor with a nice digital stove comes to the rescue.
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| My oven refuses to light completely |
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| Neighbor Mary Alma saves the day with her new stove |
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| Another look at the wonderful no-knead bread #3 |
The King Arthur Flour site has plenty of bread and pastry recipes. Here's King Arthur's recipe for kaiser rolls:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/kaiser-rolls-recipe
