devlin

The no minimum order is particularly welcome. Thanks! [for those who don't like poker... Amoretti....] Devlin The Village Bakery

I'm looking for a sweet potato extract or syrup. Anybody have any knowledge or resources?

The Village Bakery First, if the culture is being fed irregularly, it should be refrigerated. The "grey, mouldy scum" is normal, and shouldn't be discarded, but, rather, mixed right back into the culture before it's refreshed. In fact, that's good stuff, the "hooch," and it's entirely normal. The Village Bakery

You probably already do this, but anyway.... A variation on a caprese salad. Slice tomatoes in half, bit of salt and fresh-cracked pepper, olive oil, fresh basil, and bits of a nice gorgonzola and goat cheese. Lightly toast some fabulous bread for dipping in the left-overs.

A short couple of days later, having experimented with at least a couple of highly recommended and regarded (by me as well) methods by highly regarded bread bakers, I'm thinking Jack's sounds the likeliest thing. What I've ended up with aren't nearly what I'm going for, and the further I get from sourdough, the less I like the resulting flavor. The increased fermentation has got to help, I'm thinking. The King Arthur flour?... Um, sadly, at least in terms of what I was hoping, considering everything I've read and heard, kind of a shrug. The flavor doesn't come close to what I'm used to producing with my local flour with a sourdough starter. It looked okay, although not quite there, but the flavor was blandish with a sort of metallic aftertaste. So, I'm off to play with Jack's method. I'll try both the local flour and King Arthur, same method, and see where that takes me.

I've read somewhere that King Arthur's organic 'artisan' flour is even better for baguettes, but I haven't tried it as I already have too many different flours taking up too much room. ← I noticed that on their web site, and it's another one on my list to explore.

Thanks to both gfron and joe for the suggestions. I'm going to try both King Arthur and Gold Medal (separately) and see what I come up with.

Thank you all for your responses. Very helpful explanations and confirmed my suspicion that the bread flour I use for sourdoughs is too high in protein for what I'm looking for. I am in the U.S., by the way, and buy my flour from a mill locally, although it's not grown here locally. I'm disinclined to buy King Arthur flour or any flour I would have to have shipped as the costs are so prohibitive with shipping. So, the best alternative is probably to experiment with the flours I have access to right here. I'm a little skeptical, though, that any one flour from one particular distributer here in the states (King Arthur, for example) would be the absolute best flour for this sort of thing, frankly. Unless they buy the stuff themselves from overseas and market it as their own product. Where does the wheat in their flour come from? edit to say, I have worked with both Reinhart's and Hamelman's books, among others, such as Julia Child's book which includes a primer on the baguette with Danielle Forestier, and also the Acme rustic baguette outlined in Artisan Baker's Across America a few years ago as well. Hamelman's couple of baguette formula's use bread flour, though, and I'm not aware of any other directions from him in any other source that regard. And I've used both commercial yeast and a sourdough starter. My own sourdough starter is kept and refreshed in such a way that it has what I consider a lovely soft flavor, not "sour." I'm thinking I need to experiment with blends of flours and variations with leavens (commercial yeast vs. sourdough starter), water temps and fermentation times. Anyway, thanks again.

I've seen it referred to as T55 or baguette flour, and because I really don't want to buy flour from France, does anybody know whether it could be more or less replicated by mixing percentages of all purpose and bread flour or something?

This is all fabulously helpful. I'm following up on your suggestions, and narrowing the options. Thanks so much, and if anybody has any other thoughts, please share.

We've been narrowing our lodging search down, and I'm wondering whether Sausalito might be too far away from the actual wine country areas (it has the benefit of being close to San Francisco, of course, should we decide to spend a day there). So the places we're considering are... the Hotel Sausalito, which looks really lovely, Point Reyes Country Inn and Stables, in Point Reyes, West Marin, The Sonoma Hotel, Les Petites Maisons in Sonoma, Howard's End, Petaluma, Gerstle Park Inn in San Rafael. Opnions? Or any information about any of those particular places? Recommendations? My husband and I have slightly different takes on the sort of place to stay. He would prefer something very private, like a small cottage, something along the order of either Howard's End or Les Petites Maisons, above. And although I like the look of those, and the idea of them, I think that for our first foray into the area, it might be nicer to stay in a more inn-like space for a couple of reasons. One, because we don't know the area at all, an inn would have the benefit of having more immediate amenities on the premises, and also more people readily available to ask for help and information and directions and the like. Feedback?

Actually, we've been considering all the options, including San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara and the like, so we're gathering as much preliminary info as we can right now. I'd considered from the genesis of the idea of this that just after harvest might be more desirable for us, which I figured was probably around the time y'all have mentioned (much like much of Italy, for example), and so it's reassuring to get more concrete information like this from people who know. I found your link, actually, the Napa/Sonoma link, just before you posted it here, and it looks useful. I've ordered some books as well, and so we're launching into exploratory mode now. I did find at least two very reasonably-priced places to stay in Petaluma which seemed a nice middlin' sort of area to stop over for the most part (not to mention it's where Alan Scott of Ovencrafters and also Della Fattoria reside, and I'd like to take my husband around to some brick oven places). I keep finding some really beautiful inns and the like, and although I'm of course drawn to a handful of very pricey ones, I'm thinking I'd rather find a very moderately-priced lodging so we can enjoy spending money on a whole lot of other stuff while we're there.

That is exactly the sort of information I'm looking for. I'd mentioned to a nephew that we didn't want to go during the peak or prime season, which I figured was probably around harvest, and he insisted there wasn't any such thing as a prime season to California wine country (which defies logic -- every place has a prime season, or anyway, it's always seemed so). So, thank you. That's a big step in the right direction.

Is there ever a bad time to visit California wine country? Is there a prime season we should consider? We're novices in need of advice. Recommendations for hotels, b&b's, inns, and the like.

Here's my understanding of the term "non-reactive" as it relates to cooking and baking: Any material that is considered non-porous falls within the parameters of "non-reactive" -- in other words, materials such as enamel, stainless steel, or glazed ceramic (I'm thinking porcelain falls within this category, but I'm not entirely sure). Reactive materials would be something like aluminum and cast iron, which, apparently, react negatively with foods that have a particular acidic content, such as, for example, tomatoes and other fruits and the like (the flavor in particular, it seems to me, is compromised, picking up the flavor of the particular medium). Plastic, apparently, is not a good medium for egg whites, as the fat content of the egg whites reacts with the chemical properties of plastic which contains some sort of fatty chemical, inhibiting the desired outcome of whipping the egg whites. Whenever I whip egg whites I invariably have Julia Child's voice in my head exhorting me to make sure my bowl and whisk are "impeccably clean," and so I make sure they are. I'm not a chemist, so I don't know how any of this actually works scientifically speaking. But here's how I approach it. As a bread baker, I always move my doughs from the metal bowls to plastic containers for a couple of reasons: 1) because I use the stretch and fold method for my sourdoughs, and because I bake in big batches, the 30 quart hobart bowl is far too unwieldy to engage with in that process (not to mention I have only one and I mix several batches in rapid succession); and, 2) the stainless steel bowl seems to me to maintain a cooler temperature than a more neutral plastic container. I use plastic for my doughs. Always.

This article may not be exactly what you were looking for, but is what I immediately though of at your reference: ("You Are What You Grow" by Michael Pollan from last Sunday's New York Times.) And it's a great read, to boot. (Edited to correct duplicated article title.) ← I read that one too and when I read that line about the 39 ingredients, I thought Pollan must have read the same article I referenced above. So, anyway, after a cursory search at the Times, I ended up googling "twinkies" and found it, an MSNBC book review of Steve Ettinger's new book Twinkie, Deconstructed.

There was an article somewhere recently (maybe The New York Times?) about how twinkies are made. The list of ingredients was long, and many of them obscure beyond belief (like spelunking in Sri Lanka or something to get a particular thing). I'm thinking it would be next to impossible for the home cook to replicate it. Which may be a good thing. Because as bad as I know they are for you, I love the suckers. So if you do happen to ever get it right, please post with a detailed description of how you got there.

Just a comment on this; I think you'll actually get more steam using ice cold water. The temp. wil fall a bit more in the oven that way I guess. Another thing; I've been doing the same in my electric oven, throwing directly at the bottom. Yesterday, however, I discovered that the floor of my oven is now out of shape. I think it has something to do with heating the metal up to almost 500F, and then throwing water at it. Did anyone else experience this? ← I'm not sure the steam from ice water is significant enough to offset the drop in oven temp (at least I've always rationalized it that way for myself). And I suppose I should warn folks that the floor of their oven might bend a bit with the practice of throwing water on it. Keeping a sheet pan on the floor of the oven might be a better practice. If my oven were better or more expensive, I'd probably make a point of that. As it is, I may just be subconsciously hoping for a reason to persuade my husband we need a new one.

Spraying the oven walls is not a problem and won't hurt the oven. Get a decent spray bottle and turn the little nozzle thingie to "stun," the smallest sort of jet spray you can get, and then just shoot one side of the wall with the spray fast and hard and close the door quickly. Steam a minute or so before you load the bread, and then another time just after. With my electric oven, I just throw a quarter of a cup of very hot tap water on the floor of the oven rather than using a spray bottle.

Hummingbird, what Glenn said. I was actually thinking exactly that last night and nearly got out of bed to post a message here. There are two places in particular to start that might be immediately gratifying and give you heart, and those would be Carol Field's cocodrillo bread and Peter Reinhart's ancient bread. They're both yeasted, and they're both very wet doughs that will give you that lovely open structure you're looking for. They both might also give you enough instant gratification that you'll keep doing them and will develop a better sense of how doughs work, and especially the sort of dough you're going for and will help you develop some useful techniques fairly quickly. The ancient bread is in Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice. And Field's cocodrillo (crocodile) bread is in her bread baking book, The Italian Baker Both books are very detailed in their instructions.

I agree. Take some time off, but don't give up. The book recommendation above is good. There are others as well, and it's a really good idea to study various techniques from some of the big bread bibles. And then you just have to keep experimenting. You should have seen my first couple of years of bread baking. Godawful stuff that I'd be embarrassed to show to anybody now. I just kept plugging along. You may feel for a very long time as if you just don't have a clue, and then gradually you'll realize you're really starting to understand how it all comes together and how the various steps and aspects work.

Okay, that helped. A few suggestions. Oven heat: 500 is good, but you should preheat for at least an hour, especially if you're using a stone or stones. It takes a long preheat for stone to sufficiently heat through. Once you've loaded the loaves, you should probably turn the heat down, maybe something around 450-475. About folding. This is maybe the most revealing thing you've said so far. Yes, you absolutely need a schedule for folding, and you're waiting way too long between folds (three hours will never get you where you want to be), and not folding enough. Or anyway, what you're doing is very different from my own method, and is very different from any I've so far seen anywhere. So, here, try this. Try folding at least 30 minutes after your final mix, and then again 30 minutes later, and then again 30 minutes later (and then maybe one more but three may be enough). And then let the dough rise untouched from anywhere from 2 to 4 hours (til at least doubled in volume). Um, as for shaping, I'm not sure what you mean by "fold," but you should probably be actually shaping instead of simply folding.

That looks pretty good! And if it tastes good, then golly, it all sounds good. Here's a question. How hot is your oven? And for how long do you preheat? Are you slashing them before you load them? And what are you baking them on? What's your folding schedule? How long between folds? And then how long is your final rise? And what's your shaping method? Is that too many questions? [Thanks for your email, I've been so swamped I've been a very bad correspondent all around.]

Sounds like a success. It sounds as if the water content might have dictated the shape (flatness) of the bread. Or perhaps the shaping? I wanted to note, since sitting around thinking about the conversation here about experimentations with water/flour content and temps, that I suspect maybe folks might be exposing their cultures to too much heat. Maybe? Dunno. But your comment about wrist "warm" got me thinking because, as I noted somewhere else, 80 degrees doesn't feel warm at all when I measure it against my wrist. I don't know that I'd even characterize is as lukewarm. It feels nearly coolish to me. And anymore, unless it's really cold in the house, I refresh and "proof" my cultures at room temp, just set them on the counter in the kitchen. Takes about 6 hours generally, sometimes 4. So, to reiterate, an instant read thermometer would probably be very useful.

I started reading this thread with interest because I wondered whether what you're looking for even exists (still not sure!). I use a knife, and frankly I don't know that a nut grinder would be faster or produce better results. But if I can find one that is and does, then I'd kinda like one too.