Exceedingly Mundane

I have another new project, in addition to the herbs from seeds project that I blogged about yesterday. I am learning to make sourdough bread from a starter, from scratch. Gail blogged about her bread here – which is the same bread. Gail was very kind and brought me some of her sourdough starter, so I could try to learn to make this same kind of bread.

Now, I’ve been making bread for years, probably since the late 90’s, but I have never made bread totally from scratch. I have had a bread machine since 1999 and have always used the dough cycle in my machine to do the mixing, kneading and first rise of the bread. I have made tons of kinds of bread “from scratch” using the dough cycle of the machine, then taking it out, kneading again, shaping, letting rise the final time and baking. I always considered that “homemade” bread, but this is a horse of a different sort.

Gail brought me the starter last Thursday, which we fed for the first time with a concoction of sugar, potato flakes and water. Here’s what the bread starter looks like after you feed it – it gets sort of a crusty, bubbly layer on top:

I threw out some of this starter on Thursday night, put the bowl back in the refrigerator, and pulled it out on Sunday afternoon to feed it again.

To read the rest of this saga, and see pictures of the before, during and after process, click more (including a great picture of what Tim did to MY BREAD) :)…

Sunday night, I mixed up the bread for the first time. I think I used too much water, so I will be working on that in the future. Bread making is a very tactile thing, I think, and I have to learn how the dough feels, how it should look, how sticky or doughy it should be, etc, things like that. Things my handy-dandy bread machine always did for me before! Although, I must point out that I never made any kind of sourdough in the machine. I made lots of other kinds, but never sourdough, and this is sourdough bread. Delicious stuff.

Anyway, here’s me mixing up the dough Sunday night (please disregard the messy kitchen!):

The dough then rises overnight, on the counter. Mine didn’t rise much, because I think it was too cold in my house that night. Something else to adjust and compensate for in the future! Here’s the dough after I took it out the next morning, added a bit more flour, and kneaded it:

And, since this recipe makes 3 loaves (something else I plan to adjust and compensate for in the future, we don’t need 3 loaves a time, I want to try to cut it in half in the future), here’s the dough cut into 3 pieces. Yes, the pieces are different sizes, I have 3 different sized loaf pans!

The bread after rising, before baking… one of them didn’t rise nearly as well as the other, and I’m attributing that to the pan. The middle pan is a metal loaf pan, but it’s insulated and I don’t think it rose nearly as well. I won’t use this pan next time, gotta dig out the glass or stoneware one, or break down and buy uniform metal pans at the store!

And tada, my bread when it came out, the two best pans:

And, the final product, cooling:

OK – now, to the best part. We were starving and devoured the smallest loaf, the one that didn’t rise (yes, this is going to kill our weight-loss plan we have just started. Tim was lamenting all night that I was sabotaging him with my new project of making bread).

Anyway, when supper was ready, I went to go cut a piece for myself and Tim to have with dinner from the medium sized loaf. Before I could get to the loaf to cut it, Tim picked it up and took a huge bite out of it. ACK! Here’s the proof!

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks! My very first foray into making bread totally from scratch, and making sourdough, a new kind to me. Thanks to Gail for the starter and all the help and advice… I have called her several times to ask questions which are probably silly to her, but I needed the help! Thanks Gail