Now that I know I was under-proofing my sourdoughs, I’m going to experiment more and try to perfect it. These loaves were made with the Tartine recipe starter that I grew and the SFBI sourdough recipe and process. I fed the starter on Thursday at 4:20pm and it doubled in size and peaked...

Loaf 50 was finally getting close to what I want in a sourdough bread, but the crumb was still too dense. My flash of insight from that loaf was that I wasn’t proofing it long enough. This loaf is exactly the same, but instead of proofing it for 2 hours and 15 minutes I proofed it for 3...

Halfway through my 100 Loaves of Bread! My last two loaves were experiments with different approaches to making sourdough, concluding with the SFBI approach is the best so far. I still wasn’t happy with the crumb of my loaves and thought that perhaps my ineptness at the loaf shaping was...

Loaf 48 and this loaf are about using my new sourdough starter. I tried a different way of preparing sourdough with Loaf 48 that I thought would save some time. As a control of the experiment I made this loaf using the SFBI sourdough approach that I’ve done many times before (loaves 27,...

Now that I have new sourdough starter (posted after this) to work with, it’s time to bake some bread with it. My attempts with the SFBI sourdough recipe have gotten progressively better, with my most recent try (Loaf 41) being good enough that I’d let someone else taste it. I...

All my loaves so far (except Loaf 1 – Beer Batter Bread and Loaf 32 – Irish Soda Breads) have been simple flour + water + yeast + salt + maybe things like grains or nuts or eggs. I haven’t yet made any enriched bread. Enriched breads typically have milk and sugar added to...

The method I have been using to simulate a hearth oven with steam is to use a pizza stone in the oven and put about a cup of water in a broiler pan at the bottom of the oven. Everything is pre-heated to 500° before the dough and water go in. Another popular method is to use an inverted Dutch...

Not every loaf of bread I bake now has a specific learning purpose, and that’s great. I feel like I’ve already accomplished what I wanted to learn with this project, which is to understand bread well enough that I can “whip up a batch” whenever we want it. That was the...