Where have the quizzes gone? Can't find them on the new layout :(
I’m starting on a sourdough kick again, I really want to be able to make a real sour loaf and a very mild loaf. I know the techniques used in making natural leavened breads have a great deal to do with how sour the outcome is. Slowing down or speeding up fermentation, temperature etc. I want to start off by creating a very mild starter. Please let me know what you think of the following method.
To make a less sour starter. I would start this on a Wednesday Morning Finishing up on Saturday morning Ready to bake bread
Hey there SC community. I just gave the go-ahead to my programmer to start the final transition to our new site design. This means the forum will be down for the weekend, but we should have a shiny-new and much more functional design starting Monday. You can also expect a flood of new content once the new site design hits.
I'm back at the oven after eight months or so and, of course, I need some suggestions. The Buffalo starter ("Bubbles") is just fine now after a bit of coaxing but yesterday's loaf has a crumb with a number of what I've heard referred to as "baker's bedrooms," holes wide and deep enough to accommodate my index finger with room to spare.
What leads to this? What adjustments do I make to avoid it? Handling? Proofing time? Hydration? Baking temperature? I'm using the Basic Sourdough Boule recipe but with 60g of whole wheat flour and 40g of rye flour.
The time is drawing near for the launch of the new Stella Culinary website design. This will greatly improve the layout of the site, making all the content easier to find through better tagging and cross linking, and most importantly, giving me the proper back-end set-up to be more fluid in my content creation.
I've been working on this redesign for the last four months, which is why you haven't seen much content from me. But I have a massive back log of videos shot, including a full content blocks on hamburgers, chicken wings, and pizza!
I just recently bought "Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast by Ken Forkish. The techniques and explanations in his book are great and I can wait to make some of the recipes. The only thing i am puzzled about is bulk fermentation. I wanted to ask what signs does everyone look for in determining when bulk fermentation is done, besides instruction in a recipe that give a time or say double or triple in size, can you do the poke test, I have heard people say to lightly slap the dough to get a feel of where its at. I would be curious to know how Ken has determined some bulk rises to be 5 hrs.
Around these parts, fall and winter means that chili is rotated in as a regular dish, particularly on weekends (football, etc). My chili can best be described as "basic" or "plain". Good, but nothing spectacular. It's a "throw some stuff in a slow cooker and let it go all day" kind of affair.
I'm generally only cooking for my wife and myself, so I can experiment some. Any tips on great chili? Techniques, spice blends, unorthodox ingredients, etc. There's obviously a lot of info out there (including what defines 'chili'....), but I haven't seen much on this site yet.
If I make a 100% hyd poolish roughly 1400 grams keeping it on counter for 12 hrs. Will it make a difference if I use a very mild or very sour starter, If I inoculate it with just a few tsps ? I know I can control the sourness by retarding in the fridge.just wondering if there would be any difference between the two if I'm using such a small amount of starter.
This is my Big Green Egg. It's an outdoor ceramic oven, smoker, grill. 
Instead of using my Dutch oven to bake the bread in I'm using a pizza stone covered with a stainless steel mixing bowl. Before I put the dough on I'll score it and then you the spray bottle to apply water to the dough.