Sourdough Bread Baking 102 - Exploration

I decided to make this course after being asked many questions behind the "why" of bread baking. I am always exploring the "why" of baking so I thought I would share with you the fun I've had experimenting. This course would be a good one to follow my Sourdough Bread Baking 101 course and it is aimed at beginning and intermediate sourdough bakers. 

If you don't have a sourdough starter, don't worry, I will show you step by step (with videos) how to make your own starter. You'll also get a free downloadable e-book on how to make your own sourdough starter that you can print out. 

The course covers:

• Exploring protein quality in flour. This shows an easy test to see if your flour is suitable for bread baking. After the test we will use our test doughs to bake up a loaf of bread, so depending upon the flour your testing everyone's loaf will turn out different.
• Gluten washing - see how to extract gluten from flour. See how it looks and performs, also see how the starch looks.
• Recovering from a mistake. I made a huge mistake when I was doing one of the experiments, so instead of ditching the experiments, we explore how to recover from a mistake and we make beautiful Ciabatta bread.
• All purpose flour VS bread flour. In this experiment we explore the differences between all purpose flour and bread flour. We'll use three experiments and do a higher hydration each time. You might be surprised at the outcome.
• With the last iteration of the comparison loaves, we will use a high quality bread flour and a double hydration to bake up an 88% hydration loaf.
• The last thing we will look at is the life cycle of a sourdough starter from feeding to it's death. We'll also make pancakes from the discard! 

We'll talk about freezing dough and what happens as well as how to protect gluten in a weak dough and how to slow down fermentation (see the links in the bonus section). 

We are going to have a lot of fun! So join me in this exploration of sourdough baking! 

Teresa