Most of the questions and answers you find when Googling this group
concerning freezing deal with freezing the starter.

Since the deliciousness of sourdough takes a lot of time to develop,
can the sourdough dough be frozen to meet your schedule (or for when
you have unexpected guests?)

For instance, to save time, can flatbread or pita bread be frozen at
the point it is ready to be baked? Can loaves of bread be frozen at
any point before the baking?

It would be great if you could save space in the freezer by freezing
the dough almost ready for baking.
Thanks
Russ

PastorDIC wrote:
> It would be great if you could save space in the freezer by freezing
> the dough almost ready for baking.
>
It's a process fraught with peril. Large companies manage to do this
with yeasted breads, and really increase the amount of yeast in the
dough so there will be a rise.

It would be more reliable to bake it and freeze it. You can either
freeze it when it is fully baked, or you can bake it until it is about
80% done and then immediately wrap it and freeze it (commercially blast
freezers are used to drop the temperature in a very short period of
time) and then reheat the bread and finish baking it straight from the
freezer to an oven at your regular baking temperature. Bake until it is
done, which will take longer than 10 to 20% of the normal bake time as
the bread will have to heat up a lot before it will finish baking. This
process is called par-baking.

Still... this is much ado over nothing. I do par bake sourdough pizza
crusts for unexpected guests, or those nights where I don't really feel
like cooking or going out. But for bread.... come on, it doesn't go
stale that fast. Bake it a day or two before your guests arrive and
they'll still be delighted with your bread. Sourdough produces 50
identified preservatives.

In France, Poillane bakes large loafs intended to last a family a week,
and people argue about on which day after baking the bread is at its
peak. While some insist day one is the bomb, many opt for days 3, 4, 5,
6 or even 7.

It's just bread. Don't obsess.

Mike

--
....The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world...

Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

"Mike Avery" > wrote in message
news:mailman.7.1168993688.18804.rec.food.sourdough @mail.otherwhen.com...
> It's just bread. Don't obsess.
>
> Mike
>
wouldn't be much of a group here if we followed that advise

dan w

On Jan 16, 4:35 pm, Mike Avery > wrote:
> Still... this is much ado over nothing. I do par bake sourdough pizza
> crusts for unexpected guests, or those nights where I don't really feel
> like cooking or going out. But for bread.... come on, it doesn't go
> stale that fast. Bake it a day or two before your guests arrive and
> they'll still be delighted with your bread. Sourdough produces 50
> identified preservatives.
>
> It's just bread. Don't obsess.
> Mike

My thought was to have frozen dough ready to bake when there was an
unexpected visitor. Then I could bake it and send a fresh baked loaf
home with them.

I used to bake for unexpected visitors with non-SD bread. I even had
my own bread mixes made up for myself depending what types of bread I
wanted. I could start a loaf shortly after they came to visit and they
could go home with fresh bread. They loved it!

I guess I will have to stick with putting loaves of baked bread in the
freezer.
Russ

PastorDIC wrote:

[...]
> I guess I will have to stick with putting loaves of baked bread in the
> freezer.

You should be just fine with that.

My loafs go in the freezer in air tight plastic bags right after cooling down.

Unthawed in Microwave for 3+ minutes, then put under the grill in the
oven for a couple of minutes.

Loafs appear freshly baked.

Currently in bread paradise Germany:

Hofpfister bread is bought, qarter loafs are immediately frozen in the
same manner as above and consumed after microwaving.

Note that this is all bread with rye content. Pure white stuff may be
more fragile.

Samartha

> Russ
>
> _______________________________________________
> Rec.food.sourdough mailing list
>
> http://www.mountainbitwarrior.com/ma...food.sourdough
>

Samartha Deva wrote:
>
> Note that this is all bread with rye content. Pure white stuff may be
> more fragile.
>
> Samartha
>

I freeze roughly half the bread that I bake, mostly 100% white wheat,
as long as it goes in the oven after thawing to 'revive' the starch
crystals you'd never know the difference, in fact the crust might even
be a tad better.

Jim

Samartha Deva wrote:

> Currently in bread paradise Germany:
>
> Hofpfister bread is bought, qarter loafs are immediately frozen in the
> same manner as above and consumed after microwaving.
>
> Note that this is all bread with rye content. Pure white stuff may be
> more fragile.
>
> Samartha

Hi Samartha -

my German roommate just brought back a loaf of his favorite
Hofpfisterei bread (Schwaben) and wants me to try to duplicate it. When
Googling, besides the rec.food group I also came up with your very cool
page:
http://samartha.net/SD/index.html
Which I'm sure will take me a while to digest all of that info! (Roomie
is also translating the Hopfister page for me).

Since we're living in the SF Bay area, I was thinking that I should get
a starter from somewhere rather than trying to make one myself,
otherwise it will come out tasting like SF SD, not Bavarian...

What do you think? I could try the "Austrian" culture from World
Sourdoughs, or maybe you could beg/borrow/steal the original Hofpfister
sour...although I bet they guard it carefully.

Anyway, thanks for doing that web page, I'll try a batch or two and let
you know how it goes.

Chus - Dave

On Jan 18, 3:02 am, "TG" > wrote:
> Samartha Deva wrote:
> > Note that this is all bread with rye content. Pure white stuff may be
> > more fragile.

> Samartha I freeze roughly half the bread that I bake, mostly 100% white wheat,
> as long as it goes in the oven after thawing to 'revive' the starch
> crystals you'd never know the difference, in fact the crust might even
> be a tad better.
> Jim

Thanks for the help everybody!
Russ

wrote:
> Since we're living in the SF Bay area, I was thinking that I should get
> a starter from somewhere rather than trying to make one myself,
> otherwise it will come out tasting like SF SD, not Bavarian...
>
> What do you think? I could try the "Austrian" culture from World
> Sourdoughs, or maybe you could beg/borrow/steal the original Hofpfister
> sour...although I bet they guard it carefully.
>
A few comments are worth interjecting here... while there are
differences between cultures, in most cases what a person does with the
culture outweighs the culture itself. Many people have trouble getting
"real" sour out of Carl's culture. Dick Adams and Samartha have posted
several recipes that really work to get there.

Next, Dr. Michael Gaentzle formerly of the German Cereals Institute and
a world famous sourdough researcher feels that over time, almost all
sourdough cultures acquire and stabilize with the organisms in the
classic San Francisco sourdough culture.

Finally, romance aside, there is a lot of reason to believe that the
culture comes from the grain used to start it, not from the air.

Or.. put another way, give it a shot, make some bread, what's the worst
that could happen - you wind up with some bread?

Mike

--
....The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world...

Mike Avery mavery at mail dot otherwhen dot com
part time baker ICQ 16241692
networking guru AIM, yahoo and skype mavery81230
wordsmith

Thanks for the info Mike!

I decided to go ahead and start a homemade sour just to get going and
not wait two weeks for a culture in the mail anyway, going to start it
today. I would agree that certainly the bacteria must come from the
grain; in my homebrewing I've found that grinding the malt is best done
well away from your fermentation area, otherwise you get grain dust in
your beer and end up with a Lactobacillus infection. (Going to add some
malt flour to my bread too, as Samartha suggested). I think yeast can
produce airborne spores like most fungi, and so would expect the
population to vary from place to place; however under the selective
culturing of a sourdough it might be that certain strains would come to
dominate. I haven't really done any reading on this other than
Samartha's page and r.f.s. postings - I'll probably get the Wood book,
but then again, since people have been doing this for millenia without
books, I have nothing to lose by just diving in (except possibly flour
and time ;-) Although baking a doorstop is always embarrasing...

Happy baking - thanks, Dave

Mike Avery wrote:
> >
> A few comments are worth interjecting here... while there are
> differences between cultures, in most cases what a person does with the
> culture outweighs the culture itself. Many people have trouble getting
> "real" sour out of Carl's culture. Dick Adams and Samartha have posted
> several recipes that really work to get there.
>
> Next, Dr. Michael Gaentzle formerly of the German Cereals Institute and
> a world famous sourdough researcher feels that over time, almost all
> sourdough cultures acquire and stabilize with the organisms in the
> classic San Francisco sourdough culture.
>
> Finally, romance aside, there is a lot of reason to believe that the
> culture comes from the grain used to start it, not from the air.
>
> Or.. put another way, give it a shot, make some bread, what's the worst
> that could happen - you wind up with some bread?
>
> Mike
>
> wrote:
> > Since we're living in the SF Bay area, I was thinking that I should get
> > a starter from somewhere rather than trying to make one myself,
> > otherwise it will come out tasting like SF SD, not Bavarian...
> >
> > What do you think? I could try the "Austrian" culture from World
> > Sourdoughs, or maybe you could beg/borrow/steal the original Hofpfister
> > sour...although I bet they guard it carefully.

wrote:
> Thanks for the info Mike!
>
> I decided to go ahead and start a homemade sour just to get going and
> not wait two weeks for a culture in the mail anyway, going to start it
> today. I would agree that certainly the bacteria must come from the
> grain; in my homebrewing I've found that grinding the malt is best done
> well away from your fermentation area, otherwise you get grain dust in
> your beer and end up with a Lactobacillus infection. (Going to add some
> malt flour to my bread too, as Samartha suggested). I think yeast can
> produce airborne spores like most fungi, and so would expect the
> population to vary from place to place; however under the selective
> culturing of a sourdough it might be that certain strains would come to
> dominate. I haven't really done any reading on this other than
> Samartha's page and r.f.s. postings - I'll probably get the Wood book,
> but then again, since people have been doing this for millenia without
> books, I have nothing to lose by just diving in (except possibly flour
> and time ;-) Although baking a doorstop is always embarrasing...
>
> Happy baking - thanks, Dave
>

Hi Dave

my own experience backs up what Mike has said. I've made quite a few
starters just for the knowledge sometimes two different starter from
different flours at the same time. I have the Austrian from SDI, but
it's nothing special I did warm towards the Bahrain and the Camaldoli
but I ended up just using the very first starter I even made. Candida
m. is not supposed to be a spore forming yeast so you shouldn't have to
worry about that too much. But, your assumption about wind-born spread
contradicts. If the yeast did spore, those spores would have the
potential to travel all around the globe. The family care was one
covered in Saharan sand after a bad storm there once. That's sand not
much lighter spores traveling thousands of miles to Liverpool. Though
granted that doesn't happen very often otherwise anthrax would be a
bigger problem.

People have been baking for milenia but they were handed a lineage
master to pupil. Each baker didn't have to rediscover everything afresh
for himself. Ask what would be a good book or better still look through
the archives as this has been thrashed out quite a few times. Have a
look at recent posts in
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/
for more discussions on books last week.

Good luck and have fun

Jim

On 1/21/07, Mike Avery > wrote:
....
> Next, Dr. Michael Gaentzle formerly of the German Cereals Institute and
> a world famous sourdough researcher feels that over time, almost all
> sourdough cultures acquire and stabilize with the organisms in the
> classic San Francisco sourdough culture.

That sounds reasonable based on what I figured after reading some material.

What I have at the moment, however is two different rye sourdough
cultures, separate in two fridges.

One is from a bakery in Germay and the other I grew from a German
bread package containing "dried sourdough culture".

Both, with the identical procedure grown - same timing, same
temperature, same....

One gets more sour and rises quicker than the other. The slower has a
more mild flavor, somehow more "round" and the other I would call
"sharper".

I am doing this for about a year with fairly infrequent refreshments,
maybe averaging every 2 month.

One can argue for the equality not arriving that the refreshments are
not enough in numbers to establish the "sameness" in both cultures.

On the other side, with the cultures sold by SD Intl. being different
for a longer time with an unknown refresh rate one could argue against
the "sameness".

What gives? Who cares!

Samartha

In article
<mailman.5.1169404347.525.rec.food.sourdough@mail. otherwhen.com>,
Mike Avery > wrote:


> A few comments are worth interjecting here... while there are
> differences between cultures, in most cases what a person does with the
> culture outweighs the culture itself. Many people have trouble getting
> "real" sour out of Carl's culture. Dick Adams and Samartha have posted
> several recipes that really work to get there.
>
> Next, Dr. Michael Gaentzle formerly of the German Cereals Institute and
> a world famous sourdough researcher feels that over time, almost all
> sourdough cultures acquire and stabilize with the organisms in the
> classic San Francisco sourdough culture.

> Mike


I personally think Michael Gaentzle is wrong on this. My evidence was
when I bought SDI Russian & Bahrain and Austrian a long time back - the
Russian really was very fast rising (like Carl's) and very mild. The
Bahrain and the Austrian behaved totally differently - slow to rise and
more assertive (complex) flavor - not acidity necessarily, more the
complexity of the aroma etc. Same recipe and procedures were followed.
I let these cultures die when I went through a phase where I did no
baking so they are not in my possession currently.

I do not have confidence in making this statement too strong because I
have since experienced Wood cultures taking very long to revive. I
think this opens up the possibility of having some other organism
predominate. I am in a position to autoclave everything I use. I buy
fresh bags of flour etc so have pretty good confidence that I am not
introducing any contaminants. If SDI sold its cultures in wet form
(like some of his competitors do). I might have a little more
confidence in suggesting somebody should be able to replicate what I
described above. Even this comes with a caveat described below.

I also do not share Dr. Wood's conviction that the cultures will never
cross-contaminate. He asserts that the culture was stable over
centuries and will continue to be. I do not think he has actual data
about what the culture was like two centuries ago. Secondly even if it
was stable it was not stable in a bakery environment where it was not
exposed to 10 other cultures that do equally well on that chosen
substrate (flour and water). So I am not sure Wood approaches the
cultures with sufficient diligence to maintain their individuality. For
example he has stated in a book that he would feed cultures once every 6
months etc. I am sure at this stage (relatively feeble culture) there
really is a potential for cross-contamination. So even if the cultures
were once distinct I am not sure I have absolute confidence they still
are.

For these reasons I hesitate suggesting to Michael Gaenzle that his
assertion is easily falsifiable.

I really would like to believe that it is and the Wood's maintain a
valuable resource (which potentially they do). I unfortunately cannot
make that statement with any conviction.

Roland

On 1/22/07, Joe Doe > wrote:
....
> I personally think Michael Gaentzle is wrong on this.
....
Well, it would not only be him, but also Dr. Gallo (sp?) in Italy,
the guys in US isolating the SF SD strains as well as German SD folks
(Spicher or his co-author, don't remember his name) who isolated the
strains from stabile German cultures. Not to talk about the Finnish
and maybe Russians - have not found sources.

Taking the sources - US-, Italy-, Germany scientist which took
established sourdoughs from bakeries.

Quite a crowd to name "wrong".

Maybe the yeasts are the cause for the difference or the contiuous
propagation for a long time?

I would not discredit the researchers too easily - they have better
tools as speculation.

Samartha

Wow, I seem to have committed a grievous newbie usegroup faux pas and
hijacked this thread - once I get baking I'll have to try freezing some
dough and reply to the OP ;-)

I started a rye and a wheat yesterday and today they are bubbling
along. I'm eager to try them but may wait until the weekend. They look
and smell quite different already.

TG that's a good point you made about spores travelling, so that
supports the idea that all SD yeast end up being sanfranciscensis or
whatever. But as I learned in home brewing and winemaking, there are
lots of different yeast strains in the world indigenous to regional
beers and wines, that definitely have an impact on the flavor and aroma
of the finished product. How much this has to do with human selection I
can't say. I do know that here in CA there are a number of winemakers
who like to ferment with the wild yeast found in the vineyard, so there
must be benefits because it sure is a risk compared to killing the wild
bugs and innoculating with purchased yeast - you could end up with your
whole crop turning into undrinkable swill!

I'm going way OT now, I'll start a new post when I get a loaf or two
under my belt (actually I was a pro baker for 7 years, just new to SD).

Thanks to everyone for the advice -Dave


TG wrote:
> wrote:
> > Thanks for the info Mike!
> >
> > I decided to go ahead and start a homemade sour just to get going and
> > not wait two weeks for a culture in the mail anyway, going to start it
> > today. I would agree that certainly the bacteria must come from the
> > grain; in my homebrewing I've found that grinding the malt is best done
> > well away from your fermentation area, otherwise you get grain dust in
> > your beer and end up with a Lactobacillus infection. (Going to add some
> > malt flour to my bread too, as Samartha suggested). I think yeast can
> > produce airborne spores like most fungi, and so would expect the
> > population to vary from place to place; however under the selective
> > culturing of a sourdough it might be that certain strains would come to
> > dominate. I haven't really done any reading on this other than
> > Samartha's page and r.f.s. postings - I'll probably get the Wood book,
> > but then again, since people have been doing this for millenia without
> > books, I have nothing to lose by just diving in (except possibly flour
> > and time ;-) Although baking a doorstop is always embarrasing...
> >
> > Happy baking - thanks, Dave
> >
>
> Hi Dave
>
> my own experience backs up what Mike has said. I've made quite a few
> starters just for the knowledge sometimes two different starter from
> different flours at the same time. I have the Austrian from SDI, but
> it's nothing special I did warm towards the Bahrain and the Camaldoli
> but I ended up just using the very first starter I even made. Candida
> m. is not supposed to be a spore forming yeast so you shouldn't have to
> worry about that too much. But, your assumption about wind-born spread
> contradicts. If the yeast did spore, those spores would have the
> potential to travel all around the globe. The family care was one
> covered in Saharan sand after a bad storm there once. That's sand not
> much lighter spores traveling thousands of miles to Liverpool. Though
> granted that doesn't happen very often otherwise anthrax would be a
> bigger problem.
>
> People have been baking for milenia but they were handed a lineage
> master to pupil. Each baker didn't have to rediscover everything afresh
> for himself. Ask what would be a good book or better still look through
> the archives as this has been thrashed out quite a few times. Have a
> look at recent posts in
> http://www.thefreshloaf.com/
> for more discussions on books last week.
>
> Good luck and have fun
>
> Jim

In article
<mailman.81.1169514620.1438.rec.food.sourdough@www .mountainbitwarrior.co
m>,
"Samartha Deva" > wrote:

> On 1/22/07, Joe Doe > wrote:
> ...
> > I personally think Michael Gaentzle is wrong on this.
> ...
> Well, it would not only be him, but also Dr. Gallo (sp?) in Italy,
> the guys in US isolating the SF SD strains as well as German SD folks
> (Spicher or his co-author, don't remember his name) who isolated the
> strains from stabile German cultures. Not to talk about the Finnish
> and maybe Russians - have not found sources.
>
> Taking the sources - US-, Italy-, Germany scientist which took
> established sourdoughs from bakeries.
>
> Quite a crowd to name "wrong".
>
> Maybe the yeasts are the cause for the difference or the contiuous
> propagation for a long time?
>
> I would not discredit the researchers too easily - they have better
> tools as speculation.
>
> Samartha


In your previous post you argued that you had two sourdough isolates
that behaved distinctly and now you seem to be arguing the opposite?

Anyway if you want to get technical we can - Michael Ganzle's own work
contradicts his stated opinion found in the Dan Wing book that all
cultures boil down to Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.

I am appending the abstracts of two of his recent papers that uncover
species unrelated to sanfranciscensis. Namely Lactobacillus nantensis ,
Lactobacillus hammesii sp. nov.

There is also a recent paper from a Korean group with yet another
species (Lactobacillus siliginis sp. nov.) from a Korean wheat based
sourdough. I uncovered these without even trying an exhaustive search.
Just enough to convince myself that the stated opinion is wrong.

Anyway the abstracts:

From: Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 56 (2006), 587-591
A polyphasic taxonomic study of the bacterial flora isolated from
traditional French wheat sourdough, using phenotypic characterization
and phylogenetic as well as genetic methods, revealed a consistent group
of isolates that could not be assigned to any recognized species. These
results were confirmed by randomly amplified polymorphic DNA and
amplified fragment length polymorphism fingerprinting analyses. Cells
were Gram-positive, homofermentative rods. Comparative 16S rRNA gene
sequence analysis of the representative strain LP33T indicated that
these strains belong to the genus Lactobacillus and that they formed a
branch distinct from their closest relatives Lactobacillus farciminis,
Lactobacillus alimentarius, Lactobacillus paralimentarius and
Lactobacillus mindensis. DNA-DNA reassociation experiments with the
three phylogenetically closest Lactobacillus species confirmed that
LP33T (=DSM 16982T=CIP 108546T=TMW 1.1265T) represents the type strain
of a novel species, for which the name sp. nov. is proposed


From: Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 55 (2005), 763-767

Twenty morphologically different strains were chosen from French wheat
sourdough isolates. Cells were Gram-positive, non-spore-forming,
non-motile rods. The isolates were identified using amplified-fragment
length polymorphism, randomly amplified polymorphic DNA and 16S rRNA
gene sequence analysis. All isolates were members of the genus
Lactobacillus. They were identified as representing Lactobacillus
plantarum, Lactobacillus paralimentarius, Lactobacillus
sanfranciscensis, Lactobacillus spicheri and Lactobacillus sakei.

The microflora of the investigated sourdoughs showed the typical
composition frequently reported in French and Italian sourdoughs,
Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis, Lactobacillus
paralimentarius and Lactobacillus sakei (Bervas, 1991; Infantes, 1992;
Onno & Roussel, 1994; Hammes et al., 1996; Gobetti et al., 1994).
However, isolation and identification of nine isolates as Lactobacillus
spicheri, which has been isolated as a novel species from rice sourdough
(Meroth et al., 2004), represents the first isolation of this species
from a wheat sourdough. Strain LP38T exhibited no similarity to any
other sourdough isolates or Lactobacillus reference strains using RAPD
or AFLP, and analysis of the complete 16S rRNA gene sequence revealed
that the bacterium is closely related to Lactobacillus brevis and
Lactobacillus spicheri. On the basis of these results we propose that
strains LP38T and LP39 be classified in the genus Lactobacillus as
Lactobacillus hammesii sp. nov.
..
..

Joe Doe wrote:

> Anyway if you want to get technical we can - Michael Ganzle's own work
> contradicts his stated opinion found in the Dan Wing book that all
> cultures boil down to Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis.
>


Of course I don't really know anything at all about current microbiology
and organic chemistry, but I can throw some FUD on the fire. Dan
Lepard, a British Photographer, author, and bread guru recently said
that he had some of his sourdough cultures analyzed and there was not a
trace of Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis to be found in any of the
samples he had provided. If the pictures of his bread found in his
books are to believed, you can make pretty decent bread without L.
sanfranciscensis.


Having a resident expert here, I asked my cat, Ticker, what she thought
about different strains of critters in sour dough starter. As a former
National Champion Starter taster, I thought she might has some good
insight on the issue. Instead of factual information all I got was some
dismissive commentary.

Ticker told me to just run along and bake some bread. She also added
that I should just worry about keeping good Karma in the kitchen and a
hospitable environment for the Bread Faeries. She said that the best
thing I could do was to leave the details of microbiology to those who
had the proper equipment. With that she just grinned and licked her
lips and nothing could pry another word out of her.


Regards,

Charles

I went back to the Wing book and read the Gaentzle Q&A. At least here
he does not categorically state that everything boils down to a few
simple species. So I am not sure what has been attributed to him
actually came from him. At one point he mentions when starting de novo
L sf. emerged in a few weeks but then he qualifies it with saying he
does not know whether this was due to contamination because the
researcher was likely to be covered with it because they work with it
all the time.

I am not arguing that L. sf is not commonly found in many starters - I
am just arguing for the uniqueness of certain starters (even if a few
species tend to predominate). I also realise that just because new
species are found their broad fermentation pattern may be very similar
to the "type" organism. On the other hand what investigators uncover is
only what they can culture - organisms they cannot culture will not be
described. Generally in microbiology most people feel that what you can
culture is a small fraction of what actually exists. So we are really
at a very early phase of being able to make categorical statements
about the mixture of organisms & their definitive contribution to flavor
profiles in any complex system.

In the context of Mikes original post I am not arguing against just
getting started with baking with whatever is at hand as Mike originally
suggested.

"can the sourdough dough be frozen to meet your schedule"

***********************
Hello,

Based solely on my experience, I'd say bread doughs made from whole grains freeze better than those from white bread .. and I agree with Mike Avery and others that freezing baked white bread is the best way to go.

I've been baking sourdough rye for about 15 years. Have been baking sourdough baguettes only for 1 and half years.

I freeze the rye BEFORE the first rise (after kneading the bread, I put it into oiled freezer bags, let it rest in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes to an hour, then transfer to freezer); usually make enough dough for 2 loafs. Freeze one, bake the other.

Tried that with the white and it was a disaster. Tried freezing after the first rise and get mixed results. Freezing the baked bread, however, works quite well for me. Takes less than an hour to "warm" sitting on the counter. I have "warmed" it in the oven. Adds a nicer "crisp" to the crust, but bread dries out quickly.

Hope this helps.

P.S. This is also my first post on this site ... some very interesting information being posted here.