Let's chat about starters💬🫧 On a scale of 1–10, how confident are you with understanding your starter? What still confuses you? What makes you feel most unsure? And on another note, What drives you nuts about starter advice online? What makes you roll your eyes? What advice feels overly complicated? What phrase about starter makes you cringe? You don't have to answer all the questions, just one's you relate to at the moment!

I'm all about full transparency, so let's take a look at what I did wrong and how to fix it! ✨️💯 **long read ahead** Even sourdough microbakery owners can have a flop every now and then😅 ESPECIALLY when they're so eager to do the experiment that they rush through it and don't think first🤭🤣 so let me tell you how to learn from my mistakes this time around👇🏼 Our monthly challenge at the table this month is hydration exploration - comparing your regular hydration to a new one you dare to try. And although I've handled dough at this hydration before, I've since changed up some of my methods (used to use tea towels as liners and switched to plastic shower caps for convenience) and silly me didn't properly think this one through🤫 just know I immediately ordered some more tea towels after this🤣 Anyway let's get into the nitty gritty... My ✨️impatience✨️stems from my eagerness to see the finished product. In turn I cloud my senses and don't think it through properly 👀Checking for bulk ferment doneness: I temped my dough and each dough was at slightly different temps, resulting in almost exact same bulk ferment time. As I pulled the dough away from the bowl (80% loaf) I noticed the resistance, although it did eventually pull off. And I knew... I KNEW it needed longer. How did I know? Because the other wasn't ready (64% loaf) and I knew they should be done at the same time... BUT, against my intuition, I went ahead and shaped it anyway🤦🏻‍♀️ 1 hour was the difference!! If I would've waited just ONE hour, that would've fixed one mistake. ⏳️Patience⏳️ 👐🏼Shaping: When shaping the 80% hydration loaf I did not flour the surface nor my hands beforehand - and I highly wish I would've. Because I didn't, I wasn't able to get a super tight shaping that I wanted due to the dough sticking to my fingers. I could have also wet my fingers... but in this case with the plastic shower caps, flour would've been helpful 😅 Also 👉🏼, I should have let the dough rest at least 5 minutes after reshaping to allow the gluten to relax, hence the cracking on the exterior crust (also caused by slightly underproofing)

Here’s the outcome of the pretzel dogs and pretzel bagels! According to my husband and son the dogs are good! I’ll try a pretzel bagel tomorrow but they look and smell great! I would have liked them to be a little less flat but I also almost never do same day bakes so my fermentation was probably a little off.

Definitely not perfect and I didnt get the rise during bulk fermenting that I thought I would but it taste so good

Here we go! I just loved this dough so much and the talk of a bagel bake along made me want to try pretzel bagels!! So a batch for pretzel dogs and a batch for pretzel bagels it is!