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Baking Sourdough

Love seeing a baker say that it's okay to experiment with baking bread. Recently, I had the chance to watch a home cook bake the most perfect baguettes - she had learned from a professional baker during the early pandemic days. The baker in question broadcast her lessons from her kitchen in some Italian village. 

I observed all steps of her process and became quite overwhelmed by the level of detail and precision involved in every step. The end product was a beauty and probably worth the trouble but it would kill the joy of the process if I had to repeat her steps faithfully. I would much rather get a feel for the dough and fail a dozen times before getting it right. 

..experimenting with your dough will give you hands-on experience that is far more valuable than anything I or anyone else could tell you about hydration. You need to just play with it and feel the differences for yourself. 

That's the way I taught myself to bake bread with yeast. Started to experiment with multi-grain flours very quickly because I don't like plain white bread and see no point laboring over baking it at home. Each combination of grains posed new challenges and it took several iterations to get it right but every batch was edible even if not beautiful. For someone self-taught that is not the worst outcome. I'd rather that than get cold-feet about a hundred step recipe that I can't manage to follow and so can't bake at all. 

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