Just a reminder to pour boiling water over your Exacto/utility knife before using it to slash bread dough, as you have no idea what it has come in contact with over the years!!
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People have different preferences for hydration, but you can’t go wrong with 50/50 flour/liquid…by weight, not volume.
So two issues with your ratio: not enough water, but also very specifically not enough water if you measured both flour and water using a cup rather than a scale.
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Oh, no, I know what it’s been used for! 
I’m going with @jlw 's recommendation and will continue to use my paring knife. It’s ceramic and was my first Sur La Table purchase, back in the heady 90s when telling people to turn it off and then on again made me much money.
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I go 50/50 by volume and sometimes shortchange the h2o or go heavy on the flour, and it works out. I prefer a starter that is a bit on the wet side and maybe I am not making the technically most best stuff around but I am certainly doing as well as our cave-people forebears.
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I’d heard (on the Internet 
that a serrated knife was best, so I’ve been using a tomato knife.
I guess I have to make a loaf now just to compare different blades.
Edit: the parking knife stuck and dragged through the dough. The tomato knife not so much.
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Help me out guys. I’m on day 4 of making a starter. I have bubble. It’s doubling in size. It has a sour smell. But it also kind of smells like farts. Is that normal?
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That is a good question… how can we tell is the starter is “healthy”? @jlw?
I made these biscuits using some of my discard yesterday and they turned out pretty good. Didn’t rise as much as I would have liked, but I neglected to cook them in the upper third of my oven, like the recipe dictates. Still good the next day, too.
I’m going to guess smell. Mine smells mildly of vinegar, which I have read indicates that my starter might be a little chilly. I would also be wary if it was any color but beige. Any visible mold and it’s time to start over.
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I’m afraid it might be paywalled, but the “Food” section in yesterday’s WaPo was about bread(s).
One of the recipes was for crackers using (otherwise) discarded starter:
Me, I can’t find any flour…
It’s the King Arthur Flour online store. Maybe I screwed up the URL?
It’s the first recipe on this list.
(And they’re out of flour, too.) 
No, it worked – I meant the WaPo recipe(s) might be paywalled.
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It should smell slightly sour and like rising yeast. Like you have a brewery or a bakery in your home. Very tangy smell likely indicates a too cold room.
Most important sign is this:
You want to see the starter inflate to double its size in about 4 hrs. The yeast should process an addition of food that is somewhere ⅓-½ its volume in 4 hrs. It should be at or just past its peak at the 4hr point. This is, as I understand, where the yeast has completed a cycle and is going back into a dormant/fed state waiting for more food.
Sometimes I mark the side of my container to measure.
I find that at this peak is the best place to take starter to start a loaf of bread as well.
You can take starter for pretzels, waffles, and other stuff at any point. If you do not need the long rise, the yeast is far less sensitive. With bread however, you want to hit it at the right point.
This is might be a good post to elaborate on more?
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I’d appreciate that!
Thanks!
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I saw something elsewhere (maybe a story about how local grocery stores are handing the current rush) that milling is up to keep up with the demand for flour.
So either lots of people are baking in their spare time, or people are stocking up just in case.
I finally found one 5-lb. bag of bread flour today. Now I wonder if something was wrong with it, sitting on the shelf as it was, all by its lonesome. Hadn’t seen any flour (other than smallish bags of specialty flours) in at least a week until now.
Target sells flour online, for shipping, with the caveat that it might be a while.
Any tips on doubling the recipe? In the comments at the Breadtopia No-Knead recipe, the response wasn’t too exact other than suggesting a longer baking time (how much?) and reducing the heat by 20-50 degrees F.
What do you mean by doubling the recipe? Usually if you do that with bread, you make two of the same sized loaf, not one loaf twice as big. So, the bake time should be about the same, or maybe a little more if your oven isn’t professional.
And when you say reducing the heat, do you mean right after putting the bread in the oven? That is common, to have the heat up pretty high, like 450º-500ºF, and then drop it 25º-50ºF degrees as soon as you shut the door.
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Yeah, I think I’m trying to solve a problem here & maybe too little dough is not really the problem. I’m using a pretty big (7 qt) Dutch oven. The recipe won’t fill up the bottom of the pot, instead it pancakes out on the bottom. I have a smaller Pyrex covered baking dish I might try instead (if it’s not too small: 9", 2 qt).
The bread also came out dense, not much “fluff” to it:
(Where it did have air pockets, some were quite large.) I dont think the large pot is completely to blame for this.
The flavor was fine, though – pretty sour, but not in a bad way.
What I’m trying to get is more like Ethiopian dabo – traditionally made with a starter although here they’re more likely to use yeast. (EDIT: here’s an example although I can’t vouch for this particular recipe) It also typically has more whole wheat than the Breadtopia recipe. There’s one place around here where the dabo is like the size of a birthday cake, actually taller than that. (My wife says it’s because they use too much yeast, and she doesn’t think it’s very good, though I disagree.)
So I figured that doubling the recipe should double the volume, but it might do nothing to fix the density. And for all I know that one place that makes the dabo isn’t using as much dough as I would be if I doubled my recipe.
(This one was my 2nd attempt, 1st wasn’t much different but I used a bit less water this time)
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If it’s spreading rather than holding its own, sounds like either the gluten isn’t developed enough, or you’re over-proofing.
What are your steps, exactly? Include times, please.
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