Rosie says: "I have both Speerville Whole White and Red Fife flour - would one be better than the other?"

Dan: for the starter food? I don't think it matters but I think most sourdough snobs suggest you feed it whatever it's going to be usually rising. That being said, I don't. I feed mine Speerville organic whole-wheat and my usual baking flour is the Whole White. My logic is that the 1) the whole wheat has all the nutrients it could possibly want and 2) the organic means it doesn't have chemicals. But we all know people with perfectly happy starters that live on Robin Hood ultra processed bleached no-bran white.

Jen Dubé-Smith says: I use unbleached white AP for my starter and my baking because we get 50lbs a month from hubby’s work at no charge so it’s what’s there. I made this with it last weekend.

Using wild yeast is a crap shoot - sometimes you get a great one (my brother did, his first try) and sometimes you get a lazy one.

Rosie asks: When you’re talking about wild yeast - do you mean starting from scratch? Should I take it for a walk around the back yard? Or does it come from the flour?

Some people say it comes from flour, some people say it comes from the air. The traditonal line is, "any kitchen that's had bread baked in it for the last few years will have wild yeast in the air" But take that with a grain of salt. This is why people share really great starters and why we have this idea of the pedigree of a starter, E.g. Juliette has been the starter for a Paris bakery for the last 400 years. But that's as much folklore as well because the yeast and bacteria strains almost certainly evolve and get replaced as time goes on and its food changes.

My situation is: my mom had given me some starter in the 1980s. Back in the day moms were trading "friendship cake" starter; they didn't call it sourdough. Anyway for some reason in the 2000s I decided to leave my starter jar in a very warm place for months and months - it was a stupid thing to do. I thought "the book says it can come back after any amount of time." But it never really did. It was weak and slow and I hated it for years and finally threw it away. And then when I heard that the guy who had been such a hero to the most litererate kids in my high school, forty years ago, had been in Paris on a bread making course, and brought back Juliette, I asked if he could share her and made a special trip down to Bridgewater just for it. And frankly she's 10x the starter than my mom's ever was.

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/7831/amish-friendship-cake/

^^ friendship cake. Step one is starting your own starter, with an interestingly more complicated method than most people have been hearing.

guys you may want to try this - allrecipes.com is pretty well curated.

Rosie says: Help, my starter has stopped starting! First I thought it was old flour, but then I got new Speerville flour and still got no rise. I’ve got two containers, both started from Dinah’s starter, took them out of the fridge, fed them, left them on a rack above the slow cooker on low for 14 hours, no rise.

I did have them covered with a somewhat tight seal, not airtight, but now I’m thinking maybe I should just cover with a damp towel to allow more circulation

I have them above the slow cooker because our idea of room temperature is nowhere near 20, especially overnight. Any tips?

Dan says: yeah leave it until it's bubbling, it may take a day. then refresh: throw away all but a tablespoon and add equal parts flour and water (or a BIT more flour than water) and mix really well. repeat every day. repeat, repeat, repeat. Plan to have sourdough flapjacks if you don't like throwing out the starter. Don't worry about the lid, you can put a towel on if you want, or just leave the lid loose.

Today's segment is why I started this course: after trying to make french / baguette type bread several times and failing, I decided to concentrate on it for weeks. Eventually I had an epiphany: french / rustic etc. bread is NOT like granny / sandwich bread, or pan rolls or pizza dough. It is a different thing.

So today's chapter is that epiphany written down into a couple hundred words: French Rustic Baguette Italian bread theory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M

^^ Sourdough people: this is a fantastic 20 minutes. He slashes the dough at 17:45 but he doesn't say how important that is. I agree with everything he presents here - including the metal scraping blade. with wet dough like this it is a necessity. The previous video showed dude using a plain pillowcase for his couche - I use a plain piece of cotton broad as well. Flour it well of course

Nichole asks: Is there a pizza dough recipe?

Jen Dubé-Smith posts one (insert graphic here) I use my Kitchenaid stand mixer but you can do it by hand. I have a busted wrist so I can’t hand knead.

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.

Topic: Your Starter's Container

Jen Dubé-Smith says: I’ve been using a mason jar for my main starter which is fed daily, and keeping a big glass bowl in the fridge for my extra discard which I feed once a week in case anyone asks for some or I need to make more than one loaf at a time

I was looking at Jake O'Shaughnessey's Sourdough Book for his commentary on containers, and I saw his recipe for sourdough pancakes, I think that's going to be my breakfast tomorrow; his recipe is called "The American Slapjack." Detailled info for the book is here.

A Mi'kmag friend, Tuma Young just posted an oatmeal brown bread recipe so I adapted that for the bread machine and started it on "Whole wheat" cycle (4½ hours). Here's the recipe: Tuma's Molasses Porridge Bread .

I changed the quantity proportions for a total of about 3 cups of flour, about a 1½ pound loaf. To do that, I used ⅓ of all the measures there except the top three yeast mixture. There seems to be a thing in recipes that no matter what, you start with 1 tablespoon of yeast. Also I added about another tablespoon of shortening because that recipe looks like it doesn't have enough.

Today's discussion: Rise Time.

Tomorrow: a discussion of what kind of container to keep your starter in.

In the meantime, if you have a question or a concern that's keeping you from making bread today - just ask!

Annoyingly The Grainery was closed today - never open Mondays although Yelp said it was open - so I couldn't get a new 50lb bag of Speerville Mills Whole White.: Will get it tomorrow.

OK the bagels all disappeared so I'm making more today; I'm in a hurry so I'm using commercial yeast.

Into the bread machine: 1½ c warm (100°F) water, 1 tsp sugar, 1 tbl regular fleishman's yeast. Let it sit 10 minutes until it's dissolved and starting to grow.

Then 4c flour, 1tsp salt, ¼ c of the candied citron peel, ¼ tsp nutmeg & cinnamon each, ¼ c splenda.

So: less salt than usual because I'm in a hurry. The quick rise time would affect the texture of granny bread, but no one cares with bagels.

And no milk because that's the expected flavour of a bagel, and no fat because we don't need them to have any shelf lif.

Select "dough" cycle, it's kneading at 8:45.

They should be through their first rise at 9:30, I'll shape them and boil & bake at 10:30.

Today's ingredient topic: salt. What I wrote and was going to paste here, I pasted into a blog page.

OK Students, today I introduce your [[Yeast_Bread_Roll_Recipe?|Desert Island Yeast Bread Recipe]]. If you only know or have one yeast bread recipe, this could be it.

This can be used to make any kind of dinner roll, cinnamon rolls, crusty rolls, crescent rolls (NOT croissants which are a totally different thing) cloverleaf, plain pan rolls. It's from and old Joy of Cooking and notice like many old recipes, it makes really tiny rolls. Realistically plan to get 16 modern size rolls out of this.

I'd recommend pan rolls as your first yeast bread recipe as the're easy to shape and are crowd pleasers. I'll be around this weekend if anyone wants to try this and ask for help along the way.

^^ that's what they look like

AddPhoto : mostly risen loafs

I took them out of the fridge just before bedtime so they'd make progress overnight. I'll give them about another hour.

Notice that they look inflated like sausage balloons - that's how rustic / baguette / french bread works. The yeast creates pressure to inflate the thick skinned envelope you have made.

AddPic: un-risen bagels

Last night I decided to make bagels today. So I started some dough with sourdough for yeast:

• About ¼c of Juliette,
• ½c water,
• 1tsp salt,
• 2c flour.

I was looking for onion flakes for them but didn’t find ‘em but I did find some Christmas candied citron, so I put in

• a handful of that, and maybe
• ¼tsp of cinnamon and nutmeg each and
• ¼c of sweetener,

so they’re going to be citron bagels instead of onion.

I just dumped them in the bread machine and hit the “dough” button and left it overnight. That’ll knead for about an hour and then punch down the dough a couple times and then do nothing; If I was doing this by hand, I’d knead for about 10 minutes and put it in a bowl for the night. The recipe made a little under 1½lb of dough and bagels are supposed to be under ¼lb each so that will make six.

I put them somewhere warm and they should be ready to boil, then bake, later this morning.

AddPhoto: boiling bagels

AddPhoto: baked loafs

I want to have bread tomorrow morning, so while my coffee was brewing this morning I put

• ¾ of Juliette into the bread machine,
• added 1c warm water and
• 1c white bread flour

and set it to “dough” program. It’ll stir the mixture into something the consistency of pancake batter and keep it warm to rise. This intermediate batter has several names: poolish, biga, "ambrosia batter" or pre-ferment. I'm going to use the latter. Rosie had a Q: Do I need a bread machine?

Then to refresh Juliette I added ¼c warm water and ¼c Speerville organic whole wheat flour to her dish and mixed it really well with my littlest rubber scraper. If I wanted bread again on Friday, I’d leave Juliette out on the counter or on top of the bread machine, but I think I’m going to skip a day so I’ll put her back in the fridge.

So I anticipate that by late afternoon the pre-ferment will be bubbling well, and I'll add in the rest of the ingredients and mix it a bit. I think tomorrow I want something more like an italian loaf so I'll add some milk powder and some kind of oil.

AddPhoto : pre-ferment in the pan

So at around 1:00pm, I noticed that the pre-ferment was risen to twice its size so I decided to go to the next step.

Breadmaking is largely, except for salt, very forgiving in quantities. So, just to keep track of quantities:

• Refreshing the Juliette starter means adding ¼c water and ¼c whole wheat flour to maybe 2tbl of starter in her dish and mixing well.
• I use ¾ of Juliette for each batch of bread. So that’s ¼c each of water and flour that I start with.
• I added 1c water and 1c flour to start the pre-ferment so I now have 1¼c of each in the bowl.
• To make bread from 1¼c liquid, I need 3½ c flour. I already have 1¼c flour in the bowl so I add approximately another 2¼c flour
• This will make two loaves a little under 1lb each
• I add 1 tsp of salt.

I’ll give you the rules of thumb for the flour to liquid ratio tomorrow.

Purist baguettes are made from just flour, water, starter and salt, but I feel like making something like Italian bread so I added ¼c of milk powder and 2 tbl of butter, and 1 tbl of Splenda. If I’d known what I was going to make, I could have started with 1c of warm milk instead of the water.

If I was mixing this by hand I’d stir it with the handle of a wooden spoon for about five minutes, but instead I just hit the “Dough” program on the bread machine and let it run for 10 minutes and then stop it - we want it stirred, not kneaded.

I started the sponge at about 8:30 so we can see that in my kitchen, today, that starter has a rise time of about 4½ hours. By 1:15 the dough was back in the bowl so I can guess that I’m going to work with it again around supper time.

I’ll talk about [[Rise_Times?]] on a future day.

AddPhoto: pan + blob of dough

As I guessed, the dough rose about halfway in the last 4 hours. So now I'm going to cut it in half, roughly shape it, let it sit for a half hour, do the final shape and put in the pan for its final rise and put it in the fridge to rise overnight.

AddPhoto: unrisen dough in pan

This is the channel I was going to use to talk about sourdough!

Neal Bowers is also in the channel. He was the librarian at my high school -- forty years ago. And brought some sourdough, which I got some of and named Juliette, back from the Atelier P1 Bakery in Paris. In my imagination Juliette's mother sourdough has been in continuous use for the last 400 years.