The barm did double, but did not progress much from this point on. As has happened once before, it may have died on me and I don’t know how to revive it. Then we got busy with party preparations, so now it’s sitting in the refrigerator with some liquid on top — may have to start this experiment from the beginning again — sigh. There’s another starter I played with years ago that called for organic grapes (at the time the nearest Whole Foods was an hour away from us) and sooo expensive. That one died too. I’ve had the best luck with 24-to-48-hour starters than the multi-day ones.
This is one area of baking that both really frustrates and challenges me. The successes are so much fun, as you can see in the pictures. Then when things go bad it’s such a downer that I’m too depressed to start over right away. So the pannetone may have to wait until after the New Year. Or I’ll just a use a commercial-yeasted recipe instead of Peter Reinhart’s. I’ve been planning to write him and ask what I did wrong. I waited until the seed culture had doubled before turning it into barm, as instructed. HOWEVER, the instructions also said that the mixture should fall quite rapidly when tapped, which did not happen. Perhaps I should have waited 12 more hours. With the other half of the mixture I did exactly that, but it grew no more in size nor did it fall when tapped. Maybe I could have tried another addition with that one, but by that time, impatience and annoyance had set in. I’ll try again…. one of these days.
Recent Comments