mindstalk: (food)

Made my fourth loaf of whole wheat sourdough today. After dipping into Flour Water Salt Yeast last night, I decided to try an extra long ferment. 1 cup flour, water, and starter, left overnight; then adding another cup of flour, water, salt, etc. letting that rise most of the day, and baked.

It still looks like it lost a war with gravity, but is still pleasantly spongy. Also, "etc." included two spoons of caraway seeds (sadly I don't recall if tablespoon or teaspoon), and now I can finally taste the caraway. I feel I achieved "actually tastes good" rather than "ambiguous but I keep eating it."

I'd also used a smaller amount of dill weed; not sure I can taste that. Does dill rye even use weed, or dill seed? ... seed, apparently. Hmm, don't have any of that.

Do I taste an effect from the long ferment? Can't tell, too many variables. I can say its spongier than the previous loaf.

(If you're thinking that 2 cups of flour isn't much bread, (a) I don't have a large mixing bowl and (b) if I'm going to be experimenting a lot, I want small experiments. Also, still kind of a low carb diet.)

In unrelated news, "not using Dawn dishsoap" continues to be a great move for not having stinky scrub pads.

In yet more unrelated news, Dreamwidth URL slugs ("fourth-bread") have to be unique, even though they're differentiated by date. What.

mindstalk: (food)

I used to make bread, starting in college. Texture/rise wasn't always the best but it usually tasted good, unlike M's first loaf (inspired by me) which rose beautifully but tasted like matzoh and that's not a good thing.

("How is it?"

"Umm... what ingredients did you use?"

"Flour, water, yeast."

"What about salt? I didn't hear salt."

"I didn't use any."

"Ah! That's why your bread tastes like leavened matzoh. Please do. It's not a bad thing.")

But at some point I stopped, I forget exactly when or why. And it doesn't really fit into my current "mostly vegetables and proteins" diet. OTOH, I had bought my first flour in years, to go back to battering my pan-fried chicken, and I thought I'd try my hand at whole wheat sourdough.

For basically half-assing it, it has worked okay. My starter is a few days old. The bread did not rise well, but that's not a surprise; I used 2 cups flour to 1 cup water, which turns out to be very wet; no surprise then that my dough gooped out onto the flat baking pan. I also didn't knead it a whole bunch, in large part because the dough had been so wet and sticky. Despite all that it did obtain some fluffiness, and a decent sour taste. Warm, with butter melting on it, it tastes wonderful. Plain, it's okay; could probably use more salt (I used 1/4 teaspoon, 1/2 to 1 would be more in line with recipes), but even so it achieves eats some. "I don't know how good this is." eats some more on impulse.

20240531_161422

mindstalk: (food)
I'd bought some New York Rye from When Pigs Fly a few weeks ago. I brought the remains of it to Montreal, where I didn't touch it much until the trip back to Boston. It still hadn't gone moldy yet, without having gone totally stale and dry. This surprised me. Then I remember it's supposed to be a mild sourdough (at least I think that's what they told me, though the website doesn't say that) and that sourdough is preservative. Woot!

Or maybe they put in preservatives? But the ingredients list is wheat flour, rye flour, cider, caraway seeds, evaporated cane juice, salt and yeast. And just 1g of sugar per 110 calorie 48 gram serving, so not a lot there. The cider is odd, though.

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July 2025

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