Flour, water, salt, and time—that’s all you need to create something extraordinary. If you’re baking today I pray it bakes up beautifully and is your most delicious bake to date. Remember Inclusions are like jewelry for your sourdough—little gems of flavor in every bite. If you’re baking today please tell me what you’re working on. Happy Baking!!!

If you’re interested in learning how to make and maintain a stiff starter, please watch my video to see how it’s done. It’s simple. It’s quick. It gives you a better gluten network. When maintained consistently it’ll give your breads higher rise. Click the link to see how to make a 50% hydration stiff starter. Pictured on the left is a liquid starter & on the right is a 50% hydration stiff starter. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8Q9sjh6/

Question. When using these in baking do you place them in water to soak and plump up, or no. Never used this and neighbor brought me a bag of blueberries. She didn't know they were dehydrated. Or maybe she was hinting she wants lemon blueberry cake lol.

Some question please? Great course but it got me thinking ... 1. Is there a guide rule for the weight of water to exchange for a given weight of instant/fresh yeast? 2. When the Yeast water has a nice shiny colony, if one migrates the water to a flour ecology, effectively growing it like a sourdough, how long would you expect it to retain the flavours from the yeast water before a refresh would be required. Obviously it's easier to see the rise in flour than it is in water, and easier to manipulate the yeast/bacteria ratio. Cheers.

Hey Crust & Crumb bakers, Rachel Parker is back with a new episode of Breaking Bread — and this time, she's taking us somewhere we didn't expect to go. Salem, Massachusetts. 1692. You know the story. The fits. The accusations. The trials. The executions. One of the darkest chapters in American history. But what if the answer wasn't witchcraft, mass hysteria, or village politics? What if it was the bread? 🎙️ Episode 2: The Fungus That Cursed a Village — Bread, Madness, and the Salem Witch Trials In this episode, Rachel digs into the genuinely unsettling theory that a fungus called ergot — growing silently on contaminated rye crops — may have triggered the hallucinations, convulsions, and visions that started the whole terrifying chain of events. A fungus so chemically similar to LSD that the symptoms of eating it read almost word for word like the testimony of the afflicted girls in Salem. A cold, wet winter. Marshy rye fields. A village with no idea what was in their flour. And then — when the grain ran out — the devil disappeared. This episode covers: 🌾 What ergot is and how it gets into your bread without anyone knowing 😱 The symptoms of ergot poisoning — and why they match the Salem testimony so closely 🗺️ The geography of the outbreak and what it tells us ⚖️ Why not everyone agrees with the theory — and why that makes it even more interesting 🍞 What it means for us as bakers who love and trust our rye This is the kind of story that makes you look at your rye flour a little differently. Give it a listen and come back here with your thoughts. Do you think the ergot theory holds up? Have you ever felt like there's something wild and ancient in rye that the other grains don't quite have? Drop it in the comments. This one is going to spark a conversation. 👉 Listen now — link in the comments below. — Henry