Breaditations

Two months into this project, I started to read more about natural fermentation versus using a yeast to start. It seemed really complicated, especially because I don’t weigh ingredients and quite frankly, mass and volume confuse me as words. But I had a cool conversation with a chef friend and they recommended just letting a poolish keep going instead of making a loaf. So I accidentally did this one day and now I’m using that to get my dough going instead of adding yeast. Which resulted in my best poolish to date! 

It passed the ‘float test’ (dropped a bit in water and it floated), a test I’d never aced before. Also it looks disgusting.

I expected this to be the best loaf that had ever come out of my oven...but...it wasn’t. It was really wet and dense and didn’t end up rising as much as I’d expected. Also, that iteration never passed any of its future tests (broke when I stretched it for the windowpane test after the slap and fold, didn’t rise to double its mass). The poolish I made with my starter was too liquid-heavy, I guess. 

Still, I ate this bread all week and though really dense, it was tasty. What I’ve learned is to keep going through with each loaf, even -- possibly especially -- when it doesn’t feel right. Every week is an experiment and a chance for observation and the result has only once been so godawful that it went into the garbage can. Even badly baked bread is freshly baked bread and it doesn’t have to be the perfect loaf. It just has to be good enough/fine/finished. Because it’s the pursuit of this project that should be most enjoyable and most interesting. The product is just its completion.