Batard, Banneton and Baguette: the three most common ways that I shape my bread. As the last sourdough loaf of my 100 Loaves of Bread project I decided to make all three shapes from one batch of dough. I was 67% successful at that. My sourdough starter, which is now almost seven months old,...

My recent failures with sourdough have me pretty upset, and I’ve been pondering what might be the cause. My theory is that my starter isn’t as active as it needs to be. To test this I did a feeding on Thanksgiving, while I was doing all my other baking, and I monitored it’s...

I’m mad at bread, again. I’m not sure what’s going on with my sourdough lately, but my success rate has been very low. This past weekend I made two batches of sourdough, which I’m only counting as one loaf here. Saturday The Saturday batch didn’t even get baked....

In preparing to make another batch of Tartine sourdough I reread the recipe in the book. He recommends using bread flour rather than the all purpose flour I’ve been using (not sure how I missed that the prior ten times I read this). Bread flour has a couple percent more gluten, which...

Something strange is going on that I don’t understand. Just like my sourdough loaves in Boulder (Loaf 69), this batch of sourdough bread had no flavor. I used my home sourdough starter and all my normal processes. I suspect that even though I fed the starter the night before to get it...

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...

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...