Artisan Bread-first attempt.

Today was the day!

Last night I put together the poolish and let it rise overnight.  I got up really early to start baking my 1st loaves of artisan bread.  The first loaf looked wonderful, but I didn't quite get it right because there is a streak of flour in it.  I haven't cut into the second loaf yet.

See there is a streak in it.
 I made the mistake of folding it under before
 putting in the dutch oven to bake.

This is the second loaf, I haven't cut into it yet.

 The recipe for the bread consisted of 4 ingredients.  Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast, which is the name of the book that I have been reading and learning from.  The book is by Ken Forkish, it is a wonderful book.  I also found his technique videos a great complement to the book.  For years I have avoided making artisan bread, because I didn't know how to handle a poolish or a biga. But just by reading his book and watching the videos I understood what I had to do and you can see the results in the pictures.

The first bread tasted wonderful.  With one bite I was hooked, I was like OMG! this is how I have ALWAYS wanted the bread I made to taste like.  The crust was crunchy, the middle soft and full of air holes.  WOW! it was worth all the effort.  The great thing is, the more I do it, the easier it will be to do.  I am really so excited.

I also made strained yogurt today.  I got really annoyed that Fage Total costed almost $8 for a quart. That's absurd considering it isn't imported from Greece any more.  It's made here in the U.S.  I don't even know if I did it right.  I just lined a strainer with cheese cloth and dumped the yogurt that I made yesterday in. Making yogurt turned out to be really easy and is worth the effort. The first time I used whole milk, this time I used 2% milk, which is why I wanted to strain it.  The yogurt from the 2% milk was a bit thin.

Homemade strained yogurt

Now that I am not working I have the time to do these things.
I just have to exercise some self control over the finished product.