Holy Cow! It worked!
10 cups of flour in this loaf
This bread is in the arms of the woman on the front of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread
Day 1: Begin seed culture with flour and water.
Day 2: Add flour and water to seed culture
Day 3: Discard half the seed culture and add flour and water.
Day 4: Discard half and add flour and water.
Day 5: Make the barm by using a cup of seed culture, flour and water.
Day 6: Make the firm starter using a cup of barm, flour and water.
Day 7: Make final dough using the firm starter, flour, water, and salt.
15 minutes of kneading.
4 hours of fermentation (unless your room is cold, like mine, in which case, more like 6).
Proof for 2-3 hours (unless, again, a cold room).
Bake about 65 minutes, with steam and baking stone.
Holy Cow, this is good bread.
And it’s big enough for our knife.
Oh. About that. I made some teeny cakes at Christmas. Farmergirl was laughing (almost fell off her stool) about how the bread knife was overkill for the cake.
Big knife. Little Cake.
Okay. She has a point.
So now we have a loaf of bread, worthy of that knife.
Big knife deserves big bread.
The grain! The crumb! I shall weep!
I also have more barm in the fridge, so the next loaf should only take about . . . two days.