Hi from Nova Scotia

Hi all, I’ve been baking bread for many decades—started 50 years ago—and baking sourdough for almost 15 years. I made my current starter maybe 9-10 years ago based on the “My Bread” Jim Lahey recipe, which I highly recommend as almost failsafe. These days sourdough is the only bread I make, I love the taste. I’ve been reading this website for a long time so thought I should introduce myself.

In my baking, I do a couple of things differently. One is, for the final rise I place two pieces of silicon baking sheet crisscross in my bread mixing bowl and place the dough to rise on that. The two silicon pieces are simply one baking sheet cut in half lengthwise. For baking I put a Dutch oven in the oven to heat up and when it’s ready I lift the dough out of the bowl by grabbing the top edges of the crisscrossed silicon sheets and lower the whole thing into the Dutch oven. That way the dough is hardly disturbed at all. It does leave marks on the finished round loaf but I don’t really care, it’s the taste and convenience that works for me.

The other thing I do is score the dough in a line marking the dough into two halves just before baking. When it is done and fully cooled I cut the loaf in half along the scored line. Then I have two semicircular loaves which are easy to cut crosswise into slices. I freeze one half and eat the other.

At this point in my life it is all about convenience and enjoying the taste. This winter I hope to experiment with making a malt sourdough loaf, so if anyone has a good recipe for that I’d be happy to read it. Malt bread is a favourite childhood memory for me.