bread poll

[coraa]

What should I try for my next bread experiment? (Backstory: I auctioned off twelve months of monthly bread for a charity auction last year. Every month, I make a trial loaf of the bread to make sure it'll come out okay, and then I make a loaf and mail it off.)

The 'base' dough is the "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" master recipe, which is an ordinary white yeast bread with mild sourdough character. Since I have, like, five loaves' worth of dough quietly aging in the fridge, I'm not looking to create a new master recipe, so no suggestions that would require a new dough (like, "rye bread" or "whole-wheat bread"), please.

[Poll #1420712]

(I've already done cheese bread, garlic bread, and herb bread, as well as an 'ordinary' sourdough loaf, and while I may revisit them, I'm not ready to duplicate yet.)

I need a baking icon.

Comments

Re: Something I have long been curious about

[coraa.livejournal.com]

There are two answers to that: the pragmatic, and the taste-related.

First, the pragmatic: not everyone's sourdough cultures are equal. My Seattle culture doesn't have a lot of loft to it. It tastes fantastic, but loaves I make with just sourdough wind up very, very flat. This is sort of okay for artisan bread intended for dipping in olive oil; less so if I actually want to bake my own sandwich bread. (Unless I want two-inch-tall sandwiches.) I'm pretty sure this isn't a failing of my method -- my Redondo Beach culture rose just fine -- but a character of the local yeasts: taste great, don't rise very much. So I use a hybrid method, starting with a sourdough culture for flavor and adding commercial yeast for rise. It works very well for me.

Second, the taste-based. I love the taste of sourdough, so most of my loaves do start out with a sourdough (or sourdough-hybrid) dough, for that wonderful, complex tangy flavor. But some breads have delicate, nuanced flavors... and sourdough rides roughshod over them. Egg bread and challah, I find, are particularly that way: they have lovely complex flavors of their own, but the flavors are so subtle that a sourdough culture will wipe 'em out, and all I taste is a vaguely sweet sourdough. So if I'm making a bread like that -- where I want a delicate flavor to take the fore -- I use commercial yeast. (Oatmeal bread is similar: while I like sourdough oatmeal bread, commercial-yeast oatmeal bread has a very different, subtler cereal flavor that I appreciate, so sometimes I make oatmeal bread with commercial yeast. Ditto barley bread. And sometimes I let the sourdough taste take over, and go with the sourdough starter, with the oatmeal or barley flavor playing backup. Rye, on the other hand, is assertive enough that it works beautifully with sourdough every time. Judgment call.)

Re: Something I have long been curious about

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

OK, that all makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

It sounds to me like I don't need to bother with commercial yeasts for now - if I make a dough with lots of water and only a little starter, and leave it out in the 80 degree kitchen, I tend to get lots of rise without much sourdough flavor.

Mmm... time to bake more, I think!