#igbreadclub

Something rather fun popped up on Instagram, while I was admiring other peoples’ breads with something approaching jealousy. An instagrammer called @season_adam announced that he was adopting the #igbreadclub hashtag and building it back to become active and bubbly. 1 The idea is once a month to pick a recipe from the unbeatable Hamelman’s Bread and then “following it, baking it and posting results, in order to widen scope, discover new things, rekindle the old, learn and continue to evolve.”

Just the ticket to force me out of my well-worn tram ruts.

The first bread we’re doing is Pain au levain with mixed sourdough starters. I’m not sure what the benefits of using both a stiff rye starter and a liquid wheat starter will be. Hamelman says

Each contributes different flavor characteristics to produce a full-flavored bread, in spite of the relatively low percentage of pre-fermented flour.

That’s good enough.

First order of the day is to build the stiff rye starter. Pity is, I just made one last week, but didn’t keep any back. Normally I start with my (100%) liquid wheat starter and just do a single build but this time, for a change, I started with my stiffer wholewheat starter and will do two builds of rye. That started last night, but with the temperature in the kitchen hovering around 13°C absolutely nothing has happened yet. I’ll build again tonight and activate the liquid starter at the same time, so as to bake on Wednesday. Probably.