2020-03-19

So I picked up 25kg of Speerville flour Tuesday - and made a page to store the price: Flour Prices. When I'm shopping I'll note some prices.

Refresh procedure is here: Refresh Your Starter

Jen Dube-Smith: can you halve this recipe?

 3c flour
 1¼c warm water
 ¾c unfed starter
 1tbsp honey
 1tsp salt

Sure! I would absolutely halve all of those ingredients.

I don't have a proofing oven so the thing I've been using lately is the Instant Pot, set on "Keep Warm" with a rack on top of that and then the bowl or tray of dough on that.

With a cloth over it, ends up being about 90-100° which is good for a faster rise.

I also sometimes use the bread machine's "dough only" setting which just kneads and sits there at temperature for a couple hours.

Ross Ktr asks: Thanks, Daniel and Jen. Will try Your recipe. If I put in bread machine is there an order of adding ingredients? do you just mix or mix and bake in bmaker? Any special cycle?

In my opinion, the final shape of a loaf is an important part of what it is. So (in my universe) you can't make a "rustic loaf" in the bread machine. But you can make a very tasty loaf.

The problem with sourdough in the bread machine is that it is programmed to work with dough with a ¾ hour rise time, and your sourdough may have a 4-5-6-12-24 hour rise time. But. Mine has a "dough" program (knead, punch down twice, do nothing) and a "Bake Now" function so you can fake it. Do the Dough function, remove the paddle, shape and put the dough back in, wait however many hours - 4, 24, whatever, and hit "Bake Now"

If you don't have a "Bake Now" cycle you can still kind of fake it - you can take out the paddle and start the machine e.g. 2 hours before the dough's ready to bake. The machine will think it's kneading but it won't be doing anything at all.

However if it was me I'd use the machine just to knead and then take the dough out to rise and shape.

Note that rustic and baguette dough only gets the most minimal of stirring, not kneading so like 10 minutes in the machine.