Sourdough Chronicles: How I Was Mooned By My Own Bread (or, fendu shaping gone awry)
Sorry for the lack of updates (and yet another sourdough post), but I just had to post pictures of the last batch of sourdough loaves that I baked. I’ve been practicing with Susan’s (of the Wild Yeast blog, a fantastic resource for all bread bakers) Norwich Sourdough recipe, and ran across her tutorial on fendu shaping. I’ve been wanting to try different shapes other than the usual batard, so I decided to bake one loaf as a fendu.
From top left, clockwise: 1) Kneading 2) Measuring out flour 3) I let the dough rise in shallow bottomed casserole dishes to make the stretch-and-fold easy. 4) Boule pre-shaping.
I guess my shaping skills still need a lot of work, because when I peeked into my oven to check on the progress of the loaves I was greeted with this:
Notice the uncanny resemblance to a pair of round buttcheeks.
In another blow to my bread-baking-ego, I didn’t slash the batard properly and the bread ended up exploding off to the side.
In the end, the breads baked up fine and tasted great. If you turn the fendu around, you kind of get a heart shape:
I apologize for the slight blurriness.
I just got back from a roadtrip up the coast with some old college friends. We ended up making stops in Carmel Valley, SF and Berkeley. I can’t wait to post some photos of the delicious food I ate while on vacation, but I must wade through the ~3GB of photos I took first!
