Just as I had rounded up all my huge pots, my canning pot, my foldup table and my jars for today’s project, the phone rang. Lo and behold – the voice in my ear was no other than online baking bud’ Fortune Elkin! I won’t spill the beans on her reason for calling but it was quite exciting and very sweet of her to call moi for my opinion.
Then it was back to getting those big pots all full of hot boiling water (except for the one full of cold water to shock the skins off those tomatoes). Canning tomatoes isn’t really hard work, but it takes awhile because of the prep – washing the jars, assembling the pots, bringing everything to a boil, dunking the tomatoes in boiling water and then cold, skinning them, cutting them and trimming where needed.
I decided to go with hot packing this time around which meant all the bits went into a big pot and boiled for 5 or so minutes (while the canner came up to speed too). Then it got put into the jars and into the canner for awhile. Now the first batch has started cooling (12 hours) and the couple of extra jars are in the canner.
Meanwhile I started my pizza dough. I also began a batch of pain au levain as a change from the ciabatta. I kept looking at the formula going – oh that’s right, no added yeast here. OK. Oh yeah, I remember autolyse. Oh yeah – shaggy mass. Got it.
More later.
