November Boboember

Hi,
Boboember indeed. It was that time of the month. Bobo had grown..I needed bread..perfect.

http://www.joejaworski.com/bread/bread2.htm

I searched for a sourdough recipe for unlike real food bloggers - I only have 2 cookbooks. no shame..no pride. :D heehee

The recipe is simple - plain bread. the key is to kneed well and to kneed enough. The recipe calls for delicate treatment of the dough, I'm not sure why. Mine turned out very light anyway.

So quick history.
According to Julia Child (the author of my 2 cookbooks) and several websites that I have read, french bread doesn't use sourdough. they use a starter. Well, Julia Child doesn't use a starter..that's why her's wasn't so nice. :(
a poolish consists of yeast, water and flour. You leave the mix overnight and then you add more flour the next day and wait for another 8 hours or so before actually making the dough.
you make a sourdough starter by mixing water and flour and leaving it out for 1-2 weeks. hopefully, wild yeast in the air would spot your deeeliiicious and tempting mix, land in it and do its magical stuff i.e. ferment. you know when they do because there are bubbles in the mix and it begins to smell like rotten fruit (or banana..I couldn't decide. :P). then you add flour and water regularly to cultivate the yeast. but as a result of the fermenting process, the starter taste sour. hence sourdough. whereas the poolish doesn't taste sour.
To slow down the fermenting process, you keep your sourdough starter in the fridge. if you don't feed it enough, some sort of thick yellow liquid will accumulate on the surface. that's alright. i think it's suppose to be a sign that your yeast are starving and possibly dying. just throw the liquid away and feed your starter.

Alrights then. I made bobo2, christianed ..hm..Sanbo. because it's supposed to be sanfrancisco sourdough bread. :)

If you see the pictures from the original recipe - her dough was kinda flat. o_O. but mine wasn't! *BEAMS*yup! not flat. she used white flour but I added a cup of multigrain flour. Rye flour especially has a higher sugar content then white flour. So the yeast feeds better.

Now about flour. There is such a thing as french flour..a.k.a flour made in france. apparently the gluten content isn't as high as the american flour. Gluten makes your dough stretchy. So many of the american recipes and some of the uk recipes e.g. Jamie Oliver call for strong bread flour. but for french bread, it's recommended that you use normal all-purpose flour due to the gluten content. now i don't know what it's supposed to be lah! I don't have that many cookbooks to learn from. haha. I tried to google it but tak jadi. Désolé!

Voila!