My friend Jason had some sourdough starter in his fridge that he uses for pizza, so I tried to use it to make a couple loaves of sourdough using the Tartine recipe. I fed a bit of his starter the night before, but it failed to really come to life by the next morning. I had a lot of other...

On to something new! Now that I’m getting confident with my sourdough, I decided to try the Tartine approach to sourdough. I followed the directions from Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread for the basic country bread as close as possible. I started by feeding my starter the night...

No new loaves for awhile because I was traveling in Europe. I didn’t ask my wife to feed my starter for me while I was gone, and I left with it already a week old. So this is what starter looks like after three weeks in the refrigerator: It’s very ugly. BUT, the odor was not so...

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...

In Sunday’s San Francisco Baking Institute class we made olive sourdough, rye and semolina loaves. Like Saturday, I made fifteen loaves of bread but am only counting it as three. We had measured all our dry ingredients out on Saturday afternoon, so we were able to jump right into...

San Francisco Baking Institute – Day 1 The San Francisco Baking Institute (www.sfbi.com) is a professional baking school. In addition to their full our professional courses, they offer week long and weekend long classes for those of us not quite ready to get a degree in baking. I signed up...

My sourdough class is another two weeks away, but I thought I’d try another loaf with my starter (which I’ve been feeding and keeping alive in the fridge). I used the same recipe from Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day that I used for Loaf 15, and the resulting failure was...

After my sourdough bread failure made with my starter (Loaf 15), I’ve hypothesized that my starter had gone stagnant. I restarted it by taking a portion of the mother starter and feeding it with flour and water. It’s living in the fridge now, but after a day of living on the...