Hello from Baltimore

I have been reading the forum for a few months, as I'm sure many others have too, and decided that it was time for me to go ahead and officially join. I love to cook, and worked in restaurant kitchens in my 20s. I also worked in an artisan bakery in high school, but did not have many kitchen responsibilities there. Since we have all been home more over the past few months, I have been learning more about baking. I have mostly been focusing on yeast french baguettes, white sourdoughs, and rye sourdoughs - oh, and pizza dough. I started baking on a pizza stone, but have recently picked up a large Cabela's cast iron combo cooker, which has really improved my oven spring and crusts.

This is today's bake - it is Maurizio from The Perfect Loaf's weekday sourdough recipe.

Another Weekday Sourdough bake:

Here is a sourdough seeded onion rye with molasses.

And here is a pizza made with starter discard from the King Arthur recipe.

The things that I am hoping to get better at are shaping batards with increased surface tension, working with higher hydration doughs, and scoring techniques. I am going back to the office a little more next week, so I will need to figure out how to work around a 9-5 schedule a little better. That is one reason that I have been working with the weekday sourdough recipe. I have been slowly increasing the hydration of that recipe and changing the folding schedule to make sure the dough strength doesn't suffer, and this has been fairly successful. Looking forward to learning from those who have been doing this for years. Thanks for having me!