last weekend i made a disgusting amount of bread. i finally worked up the courage to read Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice, one of the best cookbooks for home bakers. The recipes and accompanying chapters of instructions and techniques are succinct and precise, but he speaks so reverently and enthusiastically about bread that the instructions themselves seem approachable and engaging. Breadbaking is a mixture of precision and instinct and i can't even begin to tell you how much i learned from getting my hands in some dough and kneading. there are also some really helpful bread forums on the internet that have specific areas dedicated to the three main breadbaking cookbook staples, Reinhart's being one of them. People take pictures of their dough, of their preferment, or of their finished bread and write a short overview of what they did and what recipe they used, and the amount of helpful responses with variations or suggestions is unbelievable.
these are some potato rosemary loaves made with a biga, which is a dough-like half dough (yeast, water, and flour) that has been fermented overnight so that it has a chance to let the yeast do it's thing. Then, it's added to the main dough that has some sugar in the hopes that it'll do it's thing a second time. there's another kind of preferment called poolish, which has more water and less flour and looks like pancake batter. the photo below is a picture of what happened to the biga when i tried to take it out of the bowl the next day:
i'm going to try to make a batch of dough every weekend, maybe making a biga or poolish on friday and then baking on saturday or sunday. and i'm going to try making rolls or buns instead of whole loaves, at least until i feel a little confident in what i'm doing.
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