baking: does it come easily to you?

People get so paranoid about food existing outside of the fridge for any length of time, unless it's moldy, it's fine imo.

there seem to be different methods online, but basically just leave them out for a couple of days.

xpost yeah cheese is a lot better when you can leave it out for awhile until it gets "sad". refrigerate, repeat, refrigerate, repeat. Eat.

Did you use the same berry jam both times? At first I was thinking some acidic thing was making it curdle.

Actually I'm not. I used a rasp jam the first time, this time I'm using a cherry jam.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

For most of our evolution humans were required to distinguish between 'safe' food and 'bad' food, using only our sense of smell, taste and visual clues. Turns out, we're like most animals in being pretty good at it. I would say that visually perceptible surface mold is just one clue and often not the best one. But when you use all the clues provided by your senses and trust your innate responses to them, you'll be spot on 99% of the time.

After a night chilling in the fridge the texture has gotten smoother! Yay. Still, next time I’ll definitely make a point to let the ingredients warm to room temp.

unless it's moldy, it's fine imo

if it's moldy, cut the mold off; it's probably fine underneath

words to live by

my neighbor gave me some sourdough starter and i baked my first loaf this weekend. it turned out pretty decent for a first try, with a refrigerated starter and the most basic recipe possible basically (pics here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B4sdOHRlbN6/). i don't want to get crazy about it, like measuring out very specific amounts of ingredients as mentioned above, but i'm looking forward to experimenting.

for now i want to get the flavor more sour and the inside less dense. then move on to different ingredients/flavors.

wanna share your recipe?

That looks really good! I'm always a little amazed at how no matter how inexact the measurements are or what goes wrong during the process, it always turns out bread.

my recipe for this loaf was just some notes my neighbor emailed me. it's pretty basic. the only thing that seems weird to me is she doesn't have you measure out the amount of starter you put into the dough. you just use whatever's left after you take out 1/2 cup of the starter to feed and retain.

i'm considering keeping the starter unrefrigerated and feeding it daily, because it seems like the starter would work better that way. but i'm not going to be baking daily so it seems like i'd just end up throwing a lot of starter away.

For awhile S was coming up with recipes to make with the discard, like 'wacky cake' (sort of a spongy quick bread) or sourdough crackers (which were really good and easy to make).

do that throw-away-half-and-refresh routine the night before baking to "rev up" your starter. otherwise you can keep in fridge.

your bread looks great!

Me and my girls have very different experiences here - she outshines me in every other aspect of cooking, but she is very "yeah, about that much will do", so baking has come harder to her than me (though she's inevitably overtaking me there) - I'm aware this perspective has appeared several times throughout the thread.

i bought "flour salt water yeast" so i'm one of those guys now i guess

god bless

yeast wtf

do you even lift bro

i've noticed all these artisan bread bros love super-dark, thick crusts. which has its place and is maybe "authentic" but not something i personally want to eat all the time.

I never like those super crusty, dark breads. I kept trying to make myself like Bien Cuit in nyc and it always was dry and burnt and tore up my mouth. I don't get it. Maybe if I needed to keep it in my hobo bag for a week while traveling the rails it would be worthwhile.

even their croissants sucked and were burnt. Some people love it I guess.

For artisan bread lovers, many of the 'standard' markers of excellence in bread are just markers of how difficult they are to achieve, so when they're present you know the baker has slavishly followed the exacting procedures required to get those results. How enjoyable that style of bread is, is beside the point. Any damn fool (like me) can make a delicious muffin, but it takes a perfectionist to juggle all the variables that make for the "perfect" qualities of crust and crumb in artisan breads.

Me, I'll go on baking muffins or quick breads and leave the fussy yeast breads to the perfectionists. There's good bakery bread at a reasonable price within a mile of my house.

I baked my first batch of cookies, which also required some in motivation on my part! https://www.biggerbolderbaking.com/3-ingredient-shortbread-cookies/

The butter and flour were not mixing together (room temperature requirement strikes again?), so I added a couple eggs. I also cut them too thick and so the flavor was too samey, so I melted some chocolate over them.

Whenever I want dough (sweet or savoury) to be super-short I freeze and then grate the butter.

I'm making these tomorrow: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/bas-best-chocolate-chip-cookies

Looks awesome, email me a couple!

seems pretty similar to the cook's illustrated best chocolate chip cookies, which also use browned butter and are amazing

i aborted my first attempt at bread from "flour water salt yeast" last week because it seemed like it wasn't going right and the timing with thanksgiving was stressing me out. i'm trying again this week and it still seems like it isn't going right but i'm going to push through to the end and see what happens this time. the levain that results from his approach is way drier than i'm used to, like almost the texture of bread dough on its own.

i had some discard levain this morning so i cooked globs of it in a nonstick pan and ended up with something approaching english muffins

They turned out pretty well! The hardest part was getting them on the pan, long story short I made them too big and had to bake them longer (

Oops, I'll just post the thing
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yQScjn32d

yum!

What do people use the leftover egg for when recipes call to separate the yolk and the whites? I don't like the idea of not using one or the other.

Oh, whites freeze!

so do yolks. ice cube trays

this week's bread: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5yJZ_qFz-1/

That looks fabulous!

Ooooh C has a loaf of the overnight white loaf in the oven right now. Do you like the levain? I don't think he's tried it yet but the reg overnight and poolish recipes have been gorgeous.

thanks! i was surprised it turned out, the dough seemed so dry in every step and didn't rise as much as it was supposed to, but it's a good brownish bread. it's a time-consuming and wasteful recipe (so much discarded levain) so i'm probably going to go back to the more basic sourdough recipe i've used in the past for most weeks going forward. i want to start playing around with some additional flavor elements like seeds etc. in the future too.

try mixing in a bowlful of porridge into your dough, before the stretching and folding. whatever kind you like.

like cooked porridge? or uncooked oats

cooked porridge!

What do people use the leftover egg for when recipes call to separate the yolk and the whites? I don't like the idea of not using one or the other.

I felt bad wasting these, I should have just cooked them up and ate them.

re: unused levain you can save it in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks and use in pancakes among other things

my technique is to warm up a little milk, mix the levain into it, then mox that into the pancake batter. noticeably stronger, tastier pancakes ime

mIx but i do like the word mox actually

what is "porridge" made from?

oats! it is oatmeal. we had this discussion recently in another thread, can't remember which

the kindle edition of the tartine book is free on kindle, probably expires eventually i just closed the pop-up explaining it too fast. i am reading it.