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Hooch is largely the alcohol produced by the yeast, which could stunt or kill the yeast if there was enough of it.
If a starter is left idle for a long time (lost at the back of the fridge), it can reach a point where the yeast and the alcohol reach an equilibrium.
I give today's test bake a B-, the dough got a bit of a skin on it during the final rise and that made it hard to slash cleanly. I'll have to work on that. The crumb wasn't quite as open as I had hoped, either, I think it deflated a bit as I was transferring it from the couche to the baking sheet. I don't have a flip board, maybe I'll try to make one. Or I may try to do the final rise on the baking sheet rather than in a couche.
But it still tastes pretty good and making what Chad Robertson calls a young leaven or immature starter by adding a very small amount of my rye starter (around 5%) to flour and water at 100% hydration and letting it double overnight at room temperature, then using that plus a small amount of instant dry yeast produced a bread that rose fairly well, but with just a hint of an acid taste.
There's always a question of how long to bake a baguette. As bakers, we tend to like the ones that have a lot of browning on them, but bakeries often report that one that are just mildly browned sell faster.
I'm planning to do at least one more test bake before I break into the T65 flour.
Oh, I could THINK of doing it, but I'd fail miserably in execution, because I'm just not 'artistic'.
I've got 3 baguettes in final proof in my couche, turning them out onto the baking pan will be next, then I'll slash two of them and cut the third for epis de bles. I'm doing things a bit differently, so it's like going back to school on baguettes. This is my (first) practice batch using KAF bread flour, the recipe is a bit higher hydration than I'm used to.
I hear you on that, if I'm cooking or baking for guests, I'm focused on the kitchen, not them. But pizza for 2 means just one pie (unless I do a dessert pizza too), so not as much effort, the real challenge may be scaling recipes down so I don't wind up with 2/3 of the dough in the freezer, a lot of extra sauce, etc. I think I'm out of whole-milk mozzarella, which means a trip across town, assuming they still have it.
I was sort of figuring I'd plan to have the pizza ready to cut at the start of the party. Anyone making multiple pizzas is going to have to figure out the timing.
I'm currently taking a short course on HTML5/CSS and WordPress, this change wasn't exactly deliberate, it was a side-effect of something else I was doing.
I tend to use the Firefox 'dark mode' add-on a lot lately, it reverses the colors so the text is white on dark. I find it a lot easier to read, and I tend to increase the font size for readability, too, though that messes up a lot of web pages and apps. Hopefully my eye doctor appointment, which was originally scheduled for March but has been postponed twice due to covid19, will take place in June and I can get new glasses.
I will need cataract surgery in the next few years, but probably not this year.
You may see some flip-flopping between the old and new layouts, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what got changed and why.
Tomatoes aren't in all the recipes, I've made it without tomatoes. I like big strips of onions and peppers in mine. The sausage is always the big challenge for us, most Italian sausages have garlic in them.
Still talking about it, and I haven't had time to research the options yet, either. Let's push it to next weekend.
Does Saturday, May 16th, work for people? What time? (I think most of us are on central or eastern time.)
Thursday I will be making some baguettes, using the recipe I got with the French T65 flour (but using KAF flour this time), I plan to make these at least once to make sure my techniques are up to speed before I make a batch using the French flour. It'll also give me some bread to compare it against, including photos.
BA, do you get the checkbox at the bottom that says 'Keep a log of this edit'? (I don't know if non-administrators see that option.)
If so, you might try unchecking it and see if that has any impact on your tendency to have edits flagged as spam.
My grandmother had a metal flour bin that held probably 10 pounds of flour with a built-in sifter built into her kitchen cabinets, she'd slide the thing out and sift out the flour she needed.
I've always suspected that she just picked any flour beetles and India moth larvae out of the bowl. She grew up on an Iowa farm, so she wasn't at all squeamish about bugs, baiting fish hooks or killing and cleaning fish that we had just caught. She was an expert forager, we'd prowl the country roads on Sunday afternoons in the fall looking for nuts and berries, traipse through the snow in January to find streams where watercress grew, she even knew a few mushrooms.
Breakfast sausage is best consumed before your taste buds wake up for the day.
The pieces of onion and pepper need to be big enough to still have some substance after cooking.
I haven't tried any of the recipes on this page, but the picture at the top looks good:
sausage, peppers and onionsI think we're doing BLT's tonight.
My guess is most of it was no bigger than 10 pound bags, because it is hard to order the big ones on their website.
Costco had 12 pound bags of KAF AP earlier this year, I don't know if they've gotten any back in stock yet. Right now I suspect they don't see the need to create a custom size bag they sell at a discount, they can sell as much as they can bag up through other channels.
Before I try making baguettes with my small supply of French flour, I'm going to make them using other flour, probably KAF bread flour, partly for the practice and partly to give me something to compare to.
I think I"m going to take a riff from Chad Robertson's less-acid starter playbook and make some levain using a small amount of my rye starter as the inoculant, probably something like 100-125 grams of water, 100 grams of flour and 5 grams of rye starter. The recipe that came with the flour calls for a 'liquid sourdough starter' but doesn't say what hydration level. I'll probably try 100% first.
I haven't had any problems telling if my rye starter is growing, it pretty much doubles in size overnight. I keep it in 2 cup glass bowls.
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