I baked some more bread today.

Update: I forgot to add that I made sweet potato french fries on Saturday. Very good!

More follows:

For the whole week, I maintained an active culture in the turned off oven. I figured that by leaving the culture to sit out for a long time, that it would increase the lactobacillus’ life cycle and the lactic acid and acetic acid would be increased. Based on the results, I would say “not!” Sigh.

This time, I tried weighing flour that I added in an effort to be more precise. To figure out how much 1/2 of a cup of flour weighed, I sifted out some flour, spooned that flour into a 1/2 cup measuring cup, leveled off the top, and then weighed the result. I came up with a value of 60 grams.

Here it as after the following:

Starter – 2/3 cup (approximately)

Water – 1 cup


White flour – 1 1/2 cup

I let that sit in a warm environment for 3 hours. This was the first mistake. The recipie says overnight (24 hours) but it was Sunday and I was not waiting.

So, after waiting, I then added the following:

Water – 2 cups

White flour – 5 1/2 – 6 1/2 cups


Fine sea salt – 1 Tbsp

I started with 5 1/2 cups of flour by weight and the mixture was far too wet. I ended up adding 2 more cups of flour. Now it was still overly tacky buy at least I could knead it.

I left it to proof in the oven for three hours. Notice that I ran out of room on my pizza stone and had to use parchment paper to separate the loaves.

I baked it for 45 minutes at 425 after a “cold” start.

And, of course, the obligatory garlic spread picture.