Today was a day of experimentation. I diagnosed bread kneading, tried to figure out how to take pictures in the kitchen, and installed MTS under Linux.

I have been making weekly batches of sourdough bread, and I have problems. I can keep a culture of sourdough starter alive, but I have difficulty kneading the dough to shape a loaf of bread.

My diagnosis? I have too much gluten development. However, you want a certain amount of this in your bread. It gives the loaf structure and allows for the formation of tiny balloons which the yeast fills up to expand the bread. But you definitely do not want too much development when you mix the flour and before you knead the dough. The dough will be tough and rubbery and impossible to knead properly.

So, I performed an experiment. I decided to remove one variable from the equation and that was the starter culture. Instead, I used regular yeast which I bloomed in a cup of hot water with some sugar. I then mixed in 3 cups of flour with as little stirring as possible. After all, gluten molecules will link to other gluten molecules when you stir or knead bread.

I must say that this is the loosest dough so far. I was able to roll it out to a very thin thickness. I also was able to perform a “window pane” test by stretching the dough out before it rips so that you can see through the dough.

This tells me that I am adding too much gluten netting from my culture. I keep it in a very thick batter that I stir up to feed the yeast. I will need to switch to a thin liquid and see if that helps.

My other experiment was in taking pictures. I recently bought some accessories for my camera. They are a Manfrotto 3258 tripod with a Manfrotto 405 mount, a Canon 580EX flash, and a Canon TC-80N3 timer remote control. I have a definite lighting problem in the kitchen which I will need to work on in the future. For now, I tried using a 500W halogen work light. I set up the tripod and programmed the timer to take a picture every 5 seconds. And these are my best pictures.

Well, I learned that I need to figure out the field of picture and that I need more light.