re: Making Artisanal Bread

yea i figured you were in the boonies/bush/prairie/outback/plains/tundra. I was just wondering where.

I use Lahey's no-knead pizza dough recipe and really like it...anyone read through this?

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anyone read through this?

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yes, mentioned it upthread. It's a good entry point to high-hydration, low-kneaded bread. But, the Forkish book has more info on manipulating time and temperature to achieve more interesting flavors. Lahey focuses on recipes, he doesn't dive deeply into stretch & fold as a low-intensity technique...and his shaping instructions aren't so great. It's pretty much a wet blob & he encourages very limited shaping....whereas Forkish provides some detailed descriptions on how shaping builds internal structure into a wet dough. If you care about stuff like the grigne/ears opening up along lines scored into a loaf, then read Forkish before Lahey.

Lahey's My Pizza, his second book, is the formula I routinely use for baking-steel-broiler pizza in my home oven that is every bit as good as a wood fired pizza.

Tartine is all about levain (wild yeast), and the Forkish FWSY book has a whole section on levain....all in the young, slightly sour french style.

If you want all sourdough, all the time, also look at Andrew Whitley's little book Do Sourdough: Slow Bread for Busy Lives. It's simple, approachable, and not fussy. He includes recipes for tinned loaves, not just baked-in-a-pot rustic boules. LINK

I use commercial yeast and sourdough equally; depends on the flavor I'm trying to achieve, my time constraints, etc.

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Commercial yeast being just your standard bread, but sourdough is through wild yeast?

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Commercial yeast is packaged yeast. You buy it in either compressed fresh cake form (not common) or granular (very common). The granular stuff is what most people think of when you say "yeast"....it comes in "active dry" and "instant" formulations. The instant is a super-concentrated yeast--you need less of it to achieve the same thing as active dry yeast. Instant is sold in 1-lb bricks at Sams/Costco for about $3.50/lb. Way cheaper than the three packets of Fleischmans in a strip from the supermarket.

Wild yeast is just a culture of naturally occurring yeast. Mix flour & water, keep feeding it a little every day, discarding the excess, and eventually, the yeast population will grow strong enough to raise a loaf of bread. There are many, many feeding schedules, kinds of flours, temperature manipulations, and other variations to keeping sourdough cultures going....and just as many ways to incorporate it into various breads.

When I bake for commercial sale, I use the Forkish style long, cold fermented loaves made w/commercial yeast. The commercial yeast is very predictable (important when you're doing volume production), and an overnight cold bulk fermentation of the dough produces some nice secondary lactobacterial fermentation important for flavor. So even commercial yeast can be tweaked for maximum flavor...there's no need to go to all levain/wild yeast to achieve a nuanced loaf.

Ok, so I am starting my levain tonight using the King Arthur sourdough starter recipe using whole dark rye flour. It says to use 1 cup flour to 1/2 cup cool water (I measured by weight, 113 g each). The flour couldn’t get entirely wet so I added a little more water to make sure there was no dry flour. Should the mixture pretty much be a solid? Rather than runny? Because it’s a pretty solid thick piece of dough I have right now.

If it is solid, it’s not truly a levain. Levain refers particularly to mostly liquid cultures used when they’re not too sour. You’ve got a sourdough starter....be warned that a dry, firm starter may take longer to get going than a liquid one.

Baked two loaves of Tartine style pain au levain with toasted sesame seeds today. Hadn’t used my starter in quite some time, so I fed it every four hours on Friday, gave it a big feed on Saturday AM, then built the levain on Sat evening. Mixed the dough Sun AM, bulk fermented overnight, shaped this AM and baked after a 3-hour shaped rise. I did one loaf in a sandwich tin, and other as a boule, baked inside of an old school enameled steel GraniteWare covered turkey roaster. It is lighter weight than cast iron, yet it transfers heat and traps steam beautifully. A heckuva lot easier to hoist in and out of the oven, too.

Looks like flour and water. Gonna take 4-5 days of regular feeds.....or even as long as a week to be active enough to raise a loaf of bread. Depends on ambient temps, and other factors.

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Is that it's long term home?

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The bowl, yes. Should I keep it in a jar instead?