Report in! Post your weekly bake!
Bake General
I had a mishap with my starter, Lil Yeezy. I took him out to hit room temp and he got a little out of hand. Reminder to leave your starter container 2/3 empty.
After i cleaned up that mess i fed it and put it back in fridge for the week, but i took 100g out for bread. After I took some out and premixed with a bit of flour and water to start a preferment I got some texts from some friends so I put the preferment in the oven with the light on. While at that party, I got a text about another party. I ended up not coming home for about 10 hours. When I got back the whole thing was sitting at 140F and had a shell. All the yeast was definitely dead by this point, so I'm starting over again. This weekend was failure after failure... I didn't realize I've lights would make an oven so warm. Should have set it to proof, but I didn't want to leave it running while I was out the house.
That's a bummer. I still haven't made my own starter yet (mainly because I don't generally have a stretch of 5-7 days in a row when I'm at home at the same time.
I finally got my starter going it seems to consistently rise now.
What I learned was to not mindlessly follow recipes and schedules. Only to feed it after you experience some rise and some fall which may not always be within the 12 hours of when you feed it.
If there's not much activity leave more starter for the next feeding. Don't dilute the yeast with more food than it can eat.
Warming up the water before feeding also helped alot.
Any of you guys have experience in getting these awesome ears on your breads?
I've only been making boule shapes and my scores only produce dissapointingly flat patterns.
I've tried shallow scores and timing my final proofings such that they're not underproofed or overproofed (which is also another mystery I have). I tried cooking at 500F for the first 20 minutes.
I bake with a combo cooker, do I need more steam? Do I spray water on the boule before putting it in the oven? Do I put a steam tray in before covering the combo cooker
I'm making another one in about 2 hours and the only thing I'm gonna try this time is to place it in slightly underproofed and make an even more shallow cut.
you're the only people I can ask because I don't want to join a bread forum.
My bread in comparison with no ear
Rosemary sourdough.
You could try spritzing the bread before putting it in the oven, but I don't think that'll make much of a difference ear-wise (though it will make a difference crust-wise). When scoring your dough, make sure to score shallowly and at about a 30-degree angle. It helps to have the surface of the dough a bit dry, too (i.e. doing the final proof in a brotform/banneton basket, as opposed to a bowl.)
>General
Looks like you scored across the top of the loaf instead of towards the side. It's going to be harder to get an ear when you do a straight-down score. For your next loaf, try moving your score line down the side of the dough significantly, and then cut at an angle when you do!
makes sense,
Now that I look at the picture I want to imitate, seems like they cut it more lower and almost horizontally, while my arc was not as pronounced and the blade was slanted but still pointing downwards.
cool, stoked to see how it'll look in the next one
thanks