who only by moving can balance

Getting start(er)ed: I used instructions from Shipton Mill, lo these many years ago, but you can equally well refer to Leiths or Doves Farm or wheresoever you prefer. Shipton Mill are particularly good to my mind in that they're clear about how adjustable proportions are and explain what you're aiming for; they don't explain in quite so many words why they recommend wholemeal stoneground organic flour, but the idea there is that it's likely to come pre-inoculated with at least some of the kinds of wild yeast you're trying to catch, in a way that more processed flours (with less of their remaining exteriors) won't.

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For bonus motivation, you can catch yourself a starter for science!

Maintenance: most places will tell you to throw away half your starter, then feed it; there's an enormous range of recipes for using up "discard" rather than just binning it.

I don't bother with either of those -- the discarding, or the frantic Using It Up baking. (Mostly. Blini are a good time if I'm feeling enthusiastic.) The key principles are:

• you need to at least double the mass of your starter when you feed it (to give it enough to eat, keep its environment comfortable for it, etc);
  
• you want to feed it a very roughly 50:50 mix of flour and water each feed;
  
• you want to aim to have a minimum of ~2tbsp left over once you've extracted a portion for baking, to keep it going.

I use 100g of starter for each loaf I make. After I've removed the required quantity, the pot it lives in goes into the fridge and lives there until the night before I next want to make a loaf. The morning of, I give the breadpet roughly 50g of flour and 50g of water at about the same time I have my breakfast. Come lunchtime it's bubbled up, increased in volume, and ready to start using -- so I'm removing pretty much exactly the 100g I fed it for breakfast, which gets me back down to a stable baseline quantity rather than, you know, exponential growth.

How long your starter takes to be ready to bake with after feeding is down to the specific culture you end up making. Mine's usually good to go (from a room-temperature start) after about four hours; from fridge temperature it needs a bit longer; but 12-18 hours is often quoted, and it will probably take some experimentation.

... bread? I swear by the Leiths recipe, somewhat modified for laziness. To whit: ( Read more... )

Baking: pre-heat your oven to ~220°C, optionally with a heavy-duty baking sheet or griddle in it. Once it's up to temperature, turn the dough out onto your baking substrate (this is the point at which you find out whether you developed the gluten and floured your proving vessel adequately, but never fear, if you have to peel the dough off tentacle-by-tentacle it'll still be perfectly well food), deeply score the top with a sharp knife (so that the poor thing can actually expand in the oven), and fling it in for 30 minutes. Turn out to cool; consume.

I engage in the superstition of dumping a mug of boiling water in a roasting tray in the bottom of the oven right before I put the bread in, but I'm honestly not sure how much of a difference it makes to the crust.

There are variants involving baking in a lidded casserole or Dutch oven, on a similar keep-the-steam-in basis, but this isn't something I've particularly experimented with.

And finally...

Ornamentation! you have so many options, my goodness. Link is to a YouTube video of exciting scoring options (with timelapse photography!), including 100% of the motivation for the title of this post.