Today's batch

Today I made an extra large batch to last the boys while I'm away. I'm not entirely convinced it will be enough, but we'll see...

Today also marked my first foray into sourdough, which needed a whole different approach, and which I'm going to need to practise a fair bit more, I can tell. I'm still pretty pleased with them though.

I made two tin loaves with my newly-acquired Shipton Mill No. 1 Baker's White flour (I splashed out on a 25kg sack!). The dough was silky and wonderful to work, and the resulting loaves rose beautifully, had great texture, and smell and taste wonderful. I made a couple of fougasses with the extra left over after filling the tins, and I kept 200g back for my next batch of white bread.

I made two batches of sourdough dough, one with the rye mother and one with the white mother. I chose to use the same white flour to make both batches of dough, rather than rye flour for the rye mother, because I wanted to be able to see, smell and taste the difference between the two. The rye mother went crazy when I fed it, but the white one didn't start up until much, much later - I think it hadn't peaked when I used it, which probably explains the enormous holes in the finished loaf.

Tin loaves




Sourdough

These are made from the dough which was surplus to requirements for the bannetons. I didn't prove them for very long, and I obviously didn't score them well enough as the pictures below show - an object lesson in what happens when the loaves can't expand properly on top. I wasn't sure how long they needed in the oven, and I think they could have benefited from a longer bake. The little loaf from the rye mother is on the left in the next three images.





This is the finished white sourdough loaf, proved in a 1.5 kg oval banneton. The texture of the dough was very wet and the loaf collapsed when I turned it out of the banneton, but it rose very vigorously in the oven. The texure is like Swiss cheese!





This is the finished rye sourdough, which I proved in the 1.5 kg round banneton. It sat up nicely when it turned it out onto the peel, even though it fell out of the basket and slapped itself down quite hard. The texture is much better than the white one. The crust on both of the sourdough loaves is wonderful and crispy.