re: Baking your own bread

Awesome - you're the man. Is that foccacia recipe listed the simplest/best beginner recipe for making a herb bread? Might try this out for next Thursday.

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a splash of pineapple juice

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Don't do this. An all natural starter can be ready to use in less than a week. Pineapple juice isn't flour, water or salt.

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Don't do this. An all natural starter can be ready to use in less than a week. Pineapple juice isn't flour, water or salt.

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Google "sourdough pineapple juice solution" for a complete rundown on "Leuconostoc bacterial contamination of starters". Many, many people attempt to create a starter from flour/water, only to see it get bubbly, think they've got an active starter....and then it won't raise a loaf of bread. What they've got is a sort of "false positive" of bubbling, except the Leuconostoc is creating the bubbles & inhibiting the yeast growth.

The pineapple juice is a kind of jump-start: all it does is increase the pH of the starter rapidly....IOW, immediately creating a "sour" pH that preferences the growth of yeast over the growth of bacteria.

Microbiologist Debra Wink is the source of this advice, after much interaction online with bakers who were trying to create sourdough cultures & experiencing repeated failures. You can read her summary of her research here at the Fresh Loaf: Pineapple Juice Solution

More misinformation exists about sourdough than probably any other aspect of baking.

Also, adding a perfectly natural fruit juice to a starter is in no way "unnatural". Lots of traditional sourdough methodologies from various cultures around the world call for potato, or raisin water, or grape skins, etc.

Fair enough man, different strokes. I followed the instructions in the linked video below and I had a starter in 4 days.

Starter

RE: challah, I use a Joan Nathan recipe. It's a good bread for beginners, too, as the eggs and oil make for a silky dough that is quite forgiving. You can underproof, overbake, and make plenty of mistakes, and the challah will still turn out pretty good.

Romance of a Loaf of Bread

Oldie but goodie. I love this read.

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EVEN THE SOUND OF IT ASTONISHES. A loaf of bread straight from the oven, when it is turned out of the pan and tapped on the bottom with a knuckle, has the ring of life to it. Beneath the hardness of the crust lies the hollowness of a million cells. The ear judges and strains to name what it hears. A click? Too inanimate. A tunk? Too dull. A tock? Not resonant enough. The mind intervenes: the sound is the culinary equivalent of a rap on the back of a violin.

And hearing is the least of the sensed addressed. The nose has been engaged all through the process of bread making. It has smelled the fragrance of yeast being proofed, the odor of flour as it opens in the presence of water, the graceful scent of caramelization as the loaf browns in the oven and the quintessential aroma of hot bread as the baker cuts off the heel for a personal reward.

Oh, of course. Hot bread with pats of cold butter melting into it is bad for you. So is cookie dough, raw pastry and cake batter licked off the spatula. Tell it to the marines - or, more properly, tell it to the centuries of children and the armies of grandmothers and greau-aunts who, thank you very much, will doubt not their safety but your sanity.

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Also, what is the point of this bread maker I have sitting in my garage?

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Use that if you have it. It's way better than anything you buy. Find or download the manual and try it out. Get a recipe. Later you can worry about sourdough, but in summary, you just have to feed it once a week (with flour and water).