Sublime

mandolin, a vertically held slicer with various blade settings. They

My goal is for the levain culture to build up a large yeast population without getting too much fermentation activity early in the process—an excess of fermentation will produce acetic acids, the source of “sour” in sourdough. The best way to get to my desired mellow levain is to start with a very small amount of culture and feed it with good-quali

The incentive for using fresh or soaking your own beans is the cooking water, which, cloudy with starch from the beans and salted, is a sort of stock. If you are soaking your own, check the date of packing because they should not be more than a year old – old beans rarely soften and there are few things worse than making the effort to soak and bein

Cherry-Port Sauce

I introduced a slight hiccup in this book by having most recipes use an optional 100 grams of refrigerated levain. The recipes work with or without it (but they taste better with it!). Using this 100 grams of sourdough to flavor the loaf will slightly change the baker’s percentages in the recipes compared with not using it. To ease the understandin