Sunday

Good morning, gentle readers, and welcome to a chilly, dull Essex morning. Just about the same as yesterday really although overnight seemed a bit muggy and hot at times.

Yesterday was a bit boring really, apart from the bread making.  As I said, it's a long time since I used fresh yeast for my breadmaking and I'd forgotten how lovely it is to work with.  Beautiful dough, good rising and proving and the results were delicious.  The rest of the yeast is now in little containers, in the freezer.  When wondering how to pack it for freezing, I remembered I have little pots that I bought to take mayo, etc, to school.  I had to buy in bulk (which I did) and have loads and loads of them.  They are just the right size to hold half a pack of yeast which is what I need for one batch of dough.

I always make my usual dough with 500g of flour because that's just right for either two little loaves and some rolls or one square loaf and two rolls.  If I want more, I add another 100g flour but that won;t make any difference to the amount of yeast, it being a very flexible thing!

I must be honest, before too many people think admiring things, and admit that Thermione does the hard work for me.  Start off the yeast, pour everything in the bowl, set for ten minutes on the knead function and Bob's your uncle!  When I am retired and have more time, I probably will sometimes do it all by hand but not at the moment.

I also need (or maybe it should be 'want') to expand the range of bread I make.  Bogstandard wholemeal or white, soda bread, flat bread and, just recently, white/half and half sourdough bread is all I make.  It's all very delicious but there's a world of bread out there that I haven't even thought of with recipes freely available in the internet.

Talking of sourdough bread, I have been looking around for something that gives proportions of starter to flour and water so I can chuck in however much starter I want to use and work out the rest.  There didn't seem to be anything out there so I took one recipe, found a bit of mathematical help on Google, turned on my trusty calculator (something like 75p in Morrisons) and now I have some proportions - 100% starter, 100 and something % flour and so on . . .  I appreciate that sourdough starter varies from time to time and it's never going to be an exact science, but it is helpful to have a flexible measurement starting point.
This is where I find mathematics very useful indeed!

Fingers crossed for today's bake!