Take sourdough rise times VERY seriously.  :-(

How simply amazing? How perfectly incredible? Ted asked at supper tonight, “what’s in this?”  (yes, the disastrously flat semolina sourdough bread ) And I just sat there, smiling, and said, “flour… and water.” Okay, there’s a bit of salt, and I realized this bread also included a bit of honey. But basically, flour and water. You mix it one way, you get one thing. You bake it differently, you get another thing. It’s like the magical desserts we used to make as kids, in the cool hidden part of the garage:  water in a little teeny ring mold.  My brother swore if we left it in the ring mold long enough, it would turn to jello.  It never did:  I just figured we didn’t leave it long enough. We used to psych each other out, convincing each other we could turn our spit to concrete.  I’d find a blob on top of the concrete of the back steps and show him, saying, “see?  I spit there last week and now it’s hardened.” And he’d do the same, showi...

As promised, tonight’s bread (ungrateful child:  “do we always have to have bread??!?”) is a web version of Maggie Glezer’s Sourdough Semolina , courtesy of The Fresh Loaf . A few new techniques here, beyond just resuscitating my existing sourdough, which took two days even before I started this bread: 1) Using a stiff starter to raise a sourdough 2) Converting 100% (pancake-batter) starter to 50% (stiff) starter, as described in last night’s post . 3) Using semolina flour in a bread dough – very authentic, rustic, Italian, mmm… 4) Shaping baguette-type long breads I guess that’s it for new stuff. Anyway, I am sorrowed to report mixed results:  fine performance from the sourdough (yay!), nice taste and outstanding texture of the bread (mmm!)… but a yinky flat toad-shape in the final loaves (blech!), as you’ll see see.  Initial firm (50%) sourdough left to ferment overnight:   Now, in the morning, autolyse, mix and knead… and fast-forward 2 hours t...

Figured out the perfect applications – plural! – for the sourdough that has been coming back to life on top of my fridge all week.  Two Maggie Glezer recipes (my mother probably has her book, A Blessing of Bread, if I wanted to hold and caress it in person instead of just steal recipes over the Internet): Sourdough Semolina Bread , and then, later in the week, Sourdough Challah (or I might try this semolina challah variation ) But first… here’s the fun part, which I can actually do now that I have a scale:  all of Maggie Glezer’s recipes apparently call for a FIRM starter.  And my starter is pancake-battery; I believe it’s known as 100% hydration, which means that by weight I add about as much flour as water.  So I must spend a day converting the starter to 50% hydration… Here’s the technique I plan to follow. So much bread-geeky, scale-happy fun… Wait a minute!  That technique (Maggie Glezer’s conversion formula) is apparently WRONG, ...

Inspired by Matt, husband of Kath Eats, at  her blog, I attempted to follow his formula for Focaccia and Ciabatta.  He adapted these from a single ciabatta recipe out of Bread:  A Baker’s Book, by Jeffrey Hamelman, which is probably the #1 “Bread Book I Would Love to Own if I Had $50 Hanging About Doing Nothing.” I definitely like how, after the poolish stage, he splits the dough into small enough batches (1/3 for the ciabatta, 2/3 for the focaccia) that I could run them individually through my food processor.  No hand kneading!  My hands are still tired from last week’s challah . No idea why, but I didn’t have quite the amount of poolish as I should have.  Maybe lost some against the sides of the bowl?  I mean, I weighed everything going in, so… .it’s a mystery. Anyway, the two doughs turned out beautifully, but were not exactly the “pancake batter” consistency he describes in his blog entry.  I used all-purpose flour, not bread flour, but ...

In case you’ve been following my Adventures in Challah with bated breath, and were wondering how this week’s brand-new challah endeavour fared. Postscript:  It was GOOD.  It was VERY good.  It was very moist.  However…it was not at all sweet.  I knew that going in, but I wanted to commit to, at least the first time, making it “verbatim.”  Because I can’t stand it when people do recipes wrong the very first time and then complain that it isn’t a good recipe.  It is a good recipe, and I think tweaking it to be as sweet as I like will not be a hard thing.  It is a very soft, sticky dough, but with some working, becomes quite friendly.  Very doughy, if that’s a good word to describe dough.  We ended up taking a ball of it that I’d separated and using it to play catch with.  It was nice and rubbery; if I was a baker, I might call that “well-developed.” That could also be because I actually took the time and trouble to hand-knead...

I wanted to make a pareve banana cake for Shabbos, but didn’t have any tofutti sour cream (= Sour Supreme)… plus I wanted to see if I could get away from the creamy-margarine-based cake thing. So I found this oil-based, super-easy banana cake recipe at RecipeZaar.  Much easier than creaming, not to mention finding and buying the Sour Supreme, and nobody noticed the difference. No picture because the cake was gone about fifteen minutes after lunch ended this afternoon.  I guess that means it was good! Maybe I’ll take its picture next time.