Intro (long due?)
Hello, I am a home baker from Indonesia, I am pretty new to bread baking. I only started (fermented) bread baking around this new year, so about 10 and a half months so far. This site has been a big help to my skills in both troubleshooting but also inspirations in some lf my bakes.
For a little bit of backstory, I started making my first bread-like products (flatbreads of only flour and water, unfermented) in 2020, back then I was younger, and so I didn't know how to cook that much and had little idea of what bread actually was. Result was pretty bad, but my younger siblings eventually graduated onto yeast bread baking. In mid 2023 I started making another bread-like product, hardtack or ship's biscuit. Flour, water, salt. I did it purely out of my history interest at the time, and well... it was pretty hard, as it should be. But another step towards forward than what I made in 2020.
I then found out that bread can be just flour, water, salt, and yeast, and that was around new year. After a rough one month ride with commercial yeast, I found out about sourdough. Soon after my sourdough starter was born (back to flour, water, and salt!), February this year, so its still 9 and a half months old. So thats how I got into bread baking, and most of my bread now is still flour, water, and salt, (and starter) pretty minimal but that's the thing that appealed to me.
I discovered this site soon after my sourdough starter was going, started lurking from April, and finally signed up on June this year.
I also got into yeast water bread this July. My current yeast water culture that I feed perpertually is only 1 month 1 week old though, from mid September, because the previous ones failed or got moldy.
I hope to learn much more here!
Welcome from a near neighbor Perth Western Australia do you have locally milled wheat and is it Australian ? you have heat and humidity to deal with in your baking endeavors. Well done for filling in your details, so many new members dont. i look forward to seeing some of your breads in the near future Kind regards Derek
I do have some locally milled wheat flour, but it's a big commercial mill that only produces white flour and animal feed in my area. I also have some Australian-milled flours, namely some generic whole-wheat and some whole rye. And yes the heat and humidity here is pretty intense, and the coming monsoon season also isn't going to help. Thanks for the kind words.
From your own knowledgeable and helpful replies to others' questions, I would have thought you'd been at this much longer. Looks like you've got a great breadmaking future.
Thanks for the kind welcome, I found that breadmaking is a really rewarding hobby, and so I was able to learn (and read) a lot of information pretty quickly.