My best loaf yet!

I've had varying success with baking bread at home.  My father-in-law, brother, and mom who are all excellent bread bakers have shared wisdom and recipes, but still I haven't been successful on repeated attempts.  This whole grain bread is nice and requires lots of babysitting and time is sometimes hard to find.  Our flour experiment breads for the Bread 101 class were a mess and needed a much longer rising time.  This sourdough french bread looked funny but tasted ok for the first day then got stale very quickly.  Amy's sourdough bread tastes delicious and has lots of ingredients to boost the flavor.

I wanted to see if I could bake a good tasting bread with the most simple ingredients flour water, leaven, and salt.  I turned to the No Knead Bread Recipe published in the New York Times adapted from Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery.  It's incredibly easy to make with one 12-18 hour fermentation (or longer...I just baked one with a 24 hour fermentation including 8 hours overnight in the refrigerator) and one 2 hour rise and 40 minutes to bake.  Instead of kneading the dough needs to be folded and shaped one time each.

I've now made this recipe successfully three times!  There was one experiment that I had to throw away, but I learned that I can't substitute the water for my starter and that this dough needs to be well hydrated to rise.

On my first attempt, I followed the recipe exactly with white flour. It turned out beautifully with a lovely crust and crumb.

Next, I tried it with half Red Fife and half soft white wheat from Lonesome Whistle Farm.  It also turned out well and had the rich taste of whole wheat flour.

What I really wanted to be able to do was to use my starter as part of the leaven.  I've experimented a couple of times and found that I can add a little more than 1/2 cup of starter on top of the regular ingredients.  More starter than that, the taste is overwhelming and the dough does not have enough liquid.  Success is exciting!

Look at that gorgeous bread!  My next trial is going to be to try and and bake this with whole wheat flour and see if I can bake really good loaf of whole wheat sourdough bread at home.