/ck/ - Food & Cooking

You will not have a levain that is ready to use in 6 days. They generally take 2+ weeks to really get up to speed.

>>5071722
Grab a good baking book, a baking stone, bread flour, yeast, and salt. Pick a simple loaf and do it a million times. The best way to improve your baking is just by getting your hands dirty.

>>5071754
100% bread flour, 85% water, 3% salt, 0.3% yeast.
Mix flour and water, autolyse, add salt and yeast, mix till windowpane, bulk retard 24-72 hours, portion and preshape, bench rest, shape, roll in flour, proof on a heavily floured pan, transfer to really fucking hot stone and bake till done. Heavy flour is the nature of the best: high hydration doughs require a lot of flour.

>>5071769
I like bread with a good amount of salt in it. Undersalted bread tastes boring to me. I do my proofing in bannetons, +/- flax linen liners. It's a good accessory to have if you bake often.

>>5071790
Baker's percent. Flour is 100%. Everything else is a % of flour. So if your formulation is 100% flour, 60% water, 3% salt, 1% yeast, then the quantities based on 100 oz of flour would be 60 oz water, 3 oz salt, and 1 oz yeast. The beauty of a baker's percent is that it is infinitely scalable, which enables you to make the same bread no matter how much of the ingredients you have on hand. It's really useful for maximizing the amount of dough you can make when you have one ingredient in short supply.

>>4945222
Hit TFL. They have most everything. I would also recommend books like The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Crust and Crumb, Artisan Breads Every Day, Bread Bible, Whole Grain Breads, Tartine, so forth and so on. Crust and Crumb is probably a little advanced for a beginner baker, but once you learn how to use a scale and baker's percentages, it is a good resource for basic recipes.

>>4743070
It's a really satisfying hobby. As a career, it can be really demanding. Unlike a lot of cooking, with baking you're always chasing moving targets that operate independently of one another. Flour hydration, yeast activity, ambient temperature, ambient humidity, and water temperature can vary wildly and have a huge impact on the product.

>>4743099
Oil cured olives are delicious, and relatively easy to make at home. At my last restaurant job, I made a 5 gallon bucket of them each week so that we always had a fresh supply of fully cured olives for the patrons. What kind of bread was it? Was the crumb tight, or big and airy? Was the bread flat, or round?

>>4722961
It's exactly how I like it, and I'm the one eating it, so no, it's not burnt.

>>4595107
What kind of breads do you tend to make? There are other options, but they tend to work better for low hydration doughs. The KA is a jack of all trades, though they are easy to burn out.

>>4348580
Yeast.

>>4242221
I don't know what you were going for with that bread, so please don't be offended, but that looks like a very delicious focaccia to me. The crumb structure is dead on to what I think an idea focaccia is.

>>4242247
Do it.

>>4242249
Nice slash pattern.

>>4206006

Banneton.