This week in the ledger · Log 025 · Discard and starter care
Cream scones are the laziest good thing you can make with discard: no butter to cut in, no rolling, no resting, one bowl and one bench scraper. Heavy cream provides both the fat and the liquid, and because it is cold, the fat stays in droplets that steam apart in the oven and leave the scone short rather than bready.
Read the log · 8 Oct 2026
Log 024 · 6 Oct 2026 · Bread flour
Baguettes are the only bread in this ledger where the shaping matters more than the fermentation. A 62% dough is easy to ferment and easy to score; the difficulty is rolling three even batons and getting them onto the stone without losing the tension. Get the rolling right and the rest follows.
Log 023 · 4 Oct 2026 · Ancient grains
Einkorn is the oldest wheat still in cultivation and the worst one for bread structure. Its gluten is weak and its bran is sharp, and at 30% it will tear if you look at it wrong. The dough must never be lifted off the bench — everything happens in the bowl, with a scraper, and the finished loaf is short and fat by necessity rather than by choice.
Log 022 · 2 Oct 2026 · Discard and starter care
Three identical jars, three feeding ratios, three weeks on the same 4 °C shelf, then one bake-off. This entry is the result. It is the only test in the ledger I ran deliberately rather than as a side effect of baking, and it settled a question I had been guessing at for years: how long a starter can actually sit before it stops being usable, and which feeding ratio buys the most time.
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