The Reinhart ciabatta recipe has become one of my “go to” bread recipes, especially for sandwiches. We had a friend’s son stay with us for a couple days, BBQ and sandwiches were on the menu. I shaped the dough into one large loaf and three smaller sandwich loaves. Nothing...

As an experiment I upped the hydration of the SFBI recipe I use from 68% to 76%. I was interested to see how much difference there was in the crumb – wetter dough is supposed to make a more open crumb. The extra hydration made the dough very difficult to work with – it seemed...

My mom came to visit for a few days and I got to show off to her that I could make really good sourdough! No experiments going on here, I had to nail it. This was made in one day, I fed the starter at 7:40am, used it at 1:15pm after we returned from lunch. The bread went into the over at...

These loaves began as a routine batch of my 9 Grain wheat bread as gifts for friends… except for a few brain freezes along the way. I was making five loaves, so needed to make about 2.5kg of dough (500g being my regular size). Somehow I typed in 1,500g in my bread calculator and blindly...

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...

It’s early June and I’ve completed 50 of my 100 loaves of bread, so here’s the Halftime Recap of the game so far. I’m happy with my progress – I thought I’d be farther along in the varieties of breads that I’ve baked, but I’m much more confident with my skills than I thought I’d be...

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...

I’ve only had marginal success making sourdough bread from a starter. My first attempts were with a homegrown starter that never worked (loaves 15 and 18). We made great bread at my SFBI sourdough class, but I only had moderate success with sourdough I made at home with their starter...

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...