Baking Bread 101: Beginning a sourdough starter (pics)

I have a dry erase marker to gauge the growth.

I don't have pineapple juice. Any thing else?

We'll see how my first attempt goes, and I'll try that method if I fail.

Put together a levain of 4oz starter, 4 oz water, 4 oz wheat flour.

That's just the usual starter feeding. Will this work as a levain for the FSWY recipe?

I just got the book and it's not what he recommends. I have things cue'd up and I'm gonna throw it together tonight and tomorrow and see what happens.

I've done keto too. I need to get back to it. I just love bread and now I'm really into making my own

Nothing wrong with commercial yeast.....a long, slow cold bulk rise (in the fridge overnight) will allow the dough to develop lots of flavor from secondary fermentation. Not quite sourdough, but full flavored and wheat.

I baked some Forkish style 10% whole wheat loaves with pecans this week. Delicious.

Checked on the poolish after 12 hours and I think it over fermented. It appeared to have dropped about an inch from its max height. I mixed the bulk to combine anyway, but not looking good.

Sad.

It’s okay that the polish was a bit past its prime. Not ideal, but not terrible. It simply means that the yeast culture was out of fresh food. It doesn’t mean every single particle of yeast in the culture died.

One thing you’ll notice about the high hydration loaves is that they can appear slack and uninspiring, or under-risen....but they often have tremendous oven spring if you’re baking in a closed vessel. I’ve plopped many an uninspiring loaf into a Dutch oven and stuck it into the oven with low expectations, then lifted the lid 30 mins later to a beautiful loaf.

One thing to remember, when making a poolish or any other pre-ferment: ambient temp. If you’ve got marble countertops and an AC vent blowing right down on the mix, it will not ferment as quickly as something in a warmer spot: say, on top of the fridge, or next to the stove w/the halogen hood lights beating down. Forkish calls for mixing most of his stuff w/warm water (90 degrees), but I find this too warm in the summer in my kitchen. I go w/cooler water and a longer stretch & fold period before putting into the fridge overnight. I also adjust to using warmer water in fall/winter when my kitchen is 70 degrees or below. Remember, he’s baking in a production kitchen in the Pacific Northwest. A hardcore bread geek would tell you to take the temp of the flour as well as the water before mixing.....I fall on the side of “eh, close enough” and accept some variations in the results.

I usually bake everything, even what looks like a ruined mess. Often even those are edible. At the very least, they can feed the birds or go into the compost pile.

What's FSWY??

Take some time to shape it properly—-divide it (if needed), roughly shape into a round. Then let it rest for 20 mins....and shape into a tighter round. Look at a couple of videos on shaping a boule if you haven’t done this before. Proper, tight shaping helps with oven spring and shape....lazy, haphazard shaping is a contributing factor in flat loaves.