3-Quart Lodge Pre-Seasoned Cast-Iron Combo Cooker Expired

People put way too much damn time into their sourdoughs breads. Here's what I do.

I make bread once a week (you can feed your starter as late as once every two weeks, probably).

I take out the "dirty" tupperware dish where I grow my starter. I haven't washed it from when I used it last week, but otherwise, it's not full of starter.

I add whatever amount of water I want and whatever amount of flour I want, as long as it can make a slurry. I stir it up with a fork. You don't have to measure this, but I do measure, because you can use any bread recipe you want, as long as you subtract the flour and water that you used for the sourdough. In my specific case, I use 1/3 c water and 1/2 c bread flour. This takes about five minutes. Then I seal this tupperware and leave it out overnight.

At some point, the next day, the starter will be nice and bubbly. You can just throw in the other ingredient and mix it for five or ten minutes if you're lazy, but I prefer to use a bread machine to knead the other ingredients for a bit. My specific recipe is

Starter I made yesterday (put the dirty tupperware back in the fridge for next week)
5 1/2 c bread flour
2 c water
1 T sugar
1.5 T salt

Then cover and let it rise maybe 12-18 hours. Then punch down. Split into two and roll into baguettes. Score and let rise maybe 40 minutes.

Heat oven to 450°F and as it's heating, add a small pan of hot water.Give the baguettes a spray of water with a spray bottle and throw them in for 12 minutes before reducing heat to 350°F. Cook for another 35 minutes or so. Take out the pan of water in the last 10 minutes. It's better if you put them on a pizza stone.

It's a bit of work, and it's easier to buy the bread, but it's way easier than the nonsense most people seem to be doing with their bread. It's like their frickin' infant.

Oh yeah, I don't use a dutch oven. That's probably better in terms of taste, but the pan of water does a lot (maybe all) of the same thing. I don't like dutch oven because it just makes one little loaf and uses a ton of energy to do that. I actually double this recipe and end up with four medium sized baguettes that I hand out to friends and neighbors. Everybody loves it. I'm thinking of scaling up and making eight loves of bread, but that's going to be a bit more work. My only question is whether the oven can hold all the bread that I want to stuff into it.

Some people may read this whole thing and think that I'm a hypocrite for criticizing people for spending too much effort on their breads and then having a huge post about how I do it but if you study this, you'll realize it's not too hard. It's just 5 minutes on Friday, 10 minutes on Saturday, and then Shaping and baking the bread on Sunday. It's not really that hard, but don't tell my wife, friends, and family. They all think I'm a bread-making genius.

It's funny, but some compared keeping sourdough starter to a Tamagotchi pet for adults. I made my starter from watching one of Josh's videos (about a hundred times), which was great - and very straight forward. What I learned, later though, in order to keep the video to less than an hour, he left a lot of other details out. In his video, he was storing his starter at room temp, and using Bob's Red Mill Rye along with organic unbleached general purp flower. Well, Bob's Rye is like $4 for a 2lb bag, and organic general purpose flower is maybe $6 for a 5lb bad. That starts to really add up if you're feeding 90 grams, daily. What I learned is that many people who don't cook bread every other day refrigerate their starter.... refrigerated starter should easily last a week - 2 weeks. In addition, I now use inexpensive 5lb bags of whole wheat flower combined with Target's unbleached gen purp flower for only about $1.70 for 5lbs. Combine that with a once-a-week refresh, it's a lot easier (and cheaper) to maintain your starter.

As an aside, if you're planning on baking, let's say tomorrow, I'd recommend taking your started OUT of the fridge, doing a feeding today, let it sit overnight at room temp, and then your starter will be primed for the morning Levain/splinter.

You may still not be interested (and I can't blame you), but that info might be useful for some still on the fence.

I've had this set for years and used it for basically everything in the kitchen in addition to baking bread.

The dimensions are slightly awkward compared to a normal skillet + dutch oven (shallow side isn't deep enough for frying; deep side has wider sides and less surface area on the bottom) but certainly very usable, especially if you're not cooking huge meals for a crowd.

This is nice to have if you bake a lot and are tired of burning your fingers lowering dough into a dutch oven. I'd suggest it even more if you don't have any cast iron and are looking for a good, versatile place to start.