If you have been reading my blog posts all along the way, you may remember I played around with beginning a sourdough starter a while back. I'm at it again. With the Covid-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home orders and hoarding of supplies, yeast is very hard to find. So, I decided to revive my sourdough starter and make some loaves of sourdough bread.
I will fully admit to going through several bread recipes and bread making techniques before I found one I liked. There were a few meh but edible loaves of bread and a couple of total fails. I am going to say that it was probably a combination of user error and our house being a bit too cold for the bread to rise properly. I do not think it was any fault of the recipe.
The recipe that did end up working without a hitch, was the How To Make Sourdough Bread from the Kitchn website. Be forewarned, making sourdough bread is at least an all day process, and most realistically a two day process for best flavor.
Baking is a true labor of love. I have utmost respect for those who bake every week for their families. If your mom, dad, spouse, SO, best friend, neighbor bakes for you, give them a hug and a thank you. It’s a multi day commitment. I now understand so much better why so many Southerners where I grew up have cornbread or biscuits on a daily basis and reserve the rolls and breads for more special occasions.
Baking sourdough is kind of interesting in comparison to other breads I have made. I got to bring out both of my cast iron dutch ovens (my kitchen one and my camping one) for this endeavor. The sourdough needs the initial build up of steam achieved from cooking in a very hot, lidded pot in order for the dough to rise up instead of out. You pre-heat both your oven and your pots to a high temperature, put the loaves in and keep the oven at that high temp for a short amount of time. Then you lower the temperature for the rest of the bake. I think attempting to cook my first loaf last week as more of a baguette style was why it failed. It didn't have that spike of high steamy heat to help it rise up, so it spread instead and ended up flat and dense. Don't freak out too much if you get some smoke too with this method. You line the dutch oven with parchment paper, and as the oven heats up the parchment paper will char and smoke. As soon as you put the pots in to pre-heat, I would suggest turning on your exhaust fan and possibly opening a window. It got very smoky, very quick.
The cooking process completed beautifully with no problems at all. Here is a picture of the sourdough loaves when they finished cooking. They are beautiful. Everything rose as it was supposed to.I wanted to immediately do a victory dance of happiness when I pulled them out of my dutch ovens.
We tasted a slice. Oh my gosh. It's so good. They were crispy and flavorful on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside with jut the right amount of tang. Just a little punch of the sourdough taste and smell. Now I want to make smaller versions of these to use as bread bowls for beer cheese soup.
In my vintage wooden breadbox, these lasted us about two weeks. The sliced bread made phenomenal tuna melts. We had quite a few lunches using them for sandwiches. They were good for just snacking on with a little bit of softened butter as well.
If you are wondering what to do with all of your left over starter, King Arthur Flour has a great list of recipes that all use what is discarded when you feed your sourdough starter. Some recipes use a half cup to a cup of starter, and others use as little as a tablespoon. So many to choose from! Check out those recipes HERE. We have made the sourdough pancakes, and next we are going to try the crumpets.
