Sourdough

I grew up in a bread family. My mom made a lot of bread, and we all gobbled it up pretty much immediately. I live far away from my mom now, so if I want homemade bread I have to make it myself. Over the last few years I’ve made a few loaves with limited success, but it is frustrating to put in a bunch of time and effort only to end up with mediocre loaves that I’m not excited to eat. Recently I decided to try making bread again. Only this time I would be making sourdough bread.

To make sourdough bread you begin with a starter. A starter is a mixture of water and flour that ferments – this is where the wild yeast grows, and also where beneficial bacteria grow that give the bread it’s sour flavor. Starters should be easy. I had trouble with mine. I was trying to be too technical, and my starter didn’t like it. After a frustrating first week, I realized I needed to simplify. After all, people have used sourdough starter as a leavening agent for centuries, and they don’t have all the fancy gadgets (or the scientific knowledge as to why and how sourdough works) that we have today. So I stopped worrying so much about temperatures and perfect ratios, and lo and behold my starter started doing what it was supposed to do!

At this point I had been feeding my starter for 2 weeks and I had no bread to show for it. I had read that you can add sourdough starter to any bread recipe – you just substitute the starter for an equal amount of flour and liquid. So I tried it. I made a normal white bread loaf with some starter added in, and it turned out delicious! I made several lovely sandwiches with this bread, as you can see above.

Finally after 3 weeks my starter was rising more or less predictably. The time had come to make true sourdough bread. I mixed my starter with an appropriate amount of flour, water, and salt, folded the dough a few times, waited a lot, and came out with an incredible loaf of bread!

I had read that the first loaf from a starter may not rise much. This bread certainly isn’t tall, but look at the crumb and the lovely open structure of the bread! It tastes just as good as it looks, too! I still have a lot to learn about Sourdough, but I am so pleased that I finally made this happen! And truthfully, it wasn’t hard to do. The biggest challenge was being patient. If you’ve ever thought about trying your hand at sourdough, I would encourage you to jump right in! The water’s warm and the bread is delicious!

P.S. This week I celebrated my 8th blogiversary. Thanks for joining me for the ride!