Hooray for White Flour

This time it came out well. Here's what I did:

1 1/2 cups starter
1 cup lukewarm water
1/2 cup milk
1 Tablespoon butter
2 Tablespoons maple syrup
1 cup whole wheat flour
4 or 5 cups white flour (King Arthur all purpose, though it's not locally grown wheat)

...mixed together with a dough hook, sprinkled with 2 Tablespoons kosher salt and left to rest for an hour. Then I kneaded it, put it in a greased bowl and let it rise for about five hours. I greased a couple of small loaf pans and shaped sandwich loaves, warmed the oven (just warm-- like 80 degrees or so) and let them rise again for about two hours. Took them out of the oven, preheated to 350, put them back in and baked for forty-five minutes with a pan of hot water making steam underneath them for the first half.

Next time: use more water, like 2 1/2 cups, to have enough dough for the large loaf pans. Leave the bread in the oven while it's preheating, but take out the pan of water (it seems to encourage an uneven rise). Maybe spray the oven walls with water early on, instead.

The last batch of pancakes didn't have any baking soda, and I liked them better. One funny thing the soda seems to do is make the cakes dry out really fast while you're cooking the first side. Without soda, they're not as bubbly, but I did the fold-in-beaten-egg-whites thing and they came out great. Next time they'll be half-and-half white and whole wheat flour (decadence!).