Sourdough Bread, Country-Style French

This is a page out of my notebook that gives a description of the sourdough bread that I've been concentrating on perfecting. See the preceding post for a description on how the seed culture was started.


The recipe is based on the "Country-Style French" out of the "The Village Baker" by Joe Ortiz. I have been doing all my proofing in the oven with just the light turned on. This has been working great to keep the oven at a stable 70 F.

This iteration of the bread turned out the best looking but was too stiff to knead well (at least that's my explanation) so its crumb was a little cakey and crumbly not chewy. If you follow the directions without the addition of the final 100g of flour and then add some more as needed (maybe another 25-50g) the hydration should be good and kneading easier. Some loaves I have made too wet which ends up with good crumb but they tend to just expand out and make kinda flat spread out loaves.

Sourdough Starter - Leaven

Steven (my neighbor and framily member) and I have been working on sourdough breads now for a month or so. This posting includes a page from my "Pizza and Breads" notebook that details the steps we took to make an active sourdough starter or leaven. We have now used this leaven numerous times and I have given it out to others.

Le Gourmand - Birthday

There's no Food Service of America trucks here.

Chef-owners Bruce and Sara Naftaly of Seattle's Le Gourmand restaurant have, in the true spirit of the food movement, been creating local - so local in fact that many ingredients were sourced from backyards in Ballard - organic and seasonal cuisine for the last 25 years. Tarah and I recently took part in one of Bruce's monthly Sunday dinner classes. We thought of it as a treat - considering its $75/person price - but it turns out the class is mostly regulars, some of which have been attending nearly every month for 15 years. We (~14 people) sat around the kitchen precariously perching our wine on whatever surface we could wile trying to take notes and eat as Bruce described in detail and cooked a delicious four course meal from first principals right before our eyes. Well not totally from first principals, he used chicken and fish stock that he makes fresh daily. There was a paired wine with dinner that went into 3 of the 4 courses and was available for bottomless pouring. I definitely recommend the experience.

Art Walk

We had a great night tonight at the First Thursday Art Walk. We ended up running into a number of people we know, bought some great art - Janet Miller http://www.plantejanetart.com/ - and just had a great time.

We tried Collin's Pub in Pioneer Square for dinner. It has a great beer selection, with tons of local and interesting brews; we split 4 schooners - one of which was from the new greenwood brewery, Naked City - and the food was good to great, with a significant amount of interesting game on the menu - I had the elk. This brings up a good point that it would not be a great choice for a vegetarian. It's definitely a gastropub, which I like, but it has multiple TV that are viewable from most any seat in the house which makes it feel kinda like a sports pub. I'm not at all into TVs so this would be my one significant complaint about the place.

Bid adieu to 2008, Christopher's

Christopher, Jaimie & Matt through an awesome party on the Dec 13, 2008. El Horno (Christopher's cob oven) did his job tirelessly and baked to perfection 51 pizzas. Christopher deserves a round of applause for making 43 delicious dough balls and I helped just a little by bringing 8 doughs. The snow started falling early in the evening but with the oven and extra fire in the fire pit we staid nice and warm. It was really an incredible setting for the party.

I bought the real imported Italian pizza "00" flour from PFI this time. I'm really not into the import idea but I wanted to do a comparison to the local flour that I normally get in bulk from the Central CO-OP. I'm happy to say that it was unanimous among my house family (i.e. Samia, Steven, Tarah and I) that it tasted more like Via Tribunali but was at best comparable in quality and did not surpass the standard all purpose organic flour that I get at the CO-OP.

Visit Seattle Hornos for more pics and pizza fun.

Election Night

Union Family (Samia, Steven, Tarah & I) went to a great party on election night in Wallingford. The hosts also share their outdoor space with their neighbors and have an incredible wood fired pizza oven. It's the old oven out of Cafe Lago. It was an incredibly memorable night. After the fun pizza party we headed home to Capitol Hill and there were helicopters circling the area. We started walking toward them and found a wonderful mob of positive energy. Pike and 12th were completely filled with people celebrating the election. We stood in a crowd of thousands of people and we sang the national anthem and screamed and danced and embraced one another for hours without letting up on the passionate energy. It was absolutely incredible!!!

Greece on bike

more text to come