I was breading all weekend. I decided to try my hand at sourdough bread. I have never like the hard, dry, sour sourdough bread that you find so often, but for my birthday, a friend at work bought a loaf of wonderfully fluffy sourdough bread from the Mennonite bakery. It was melt in your mouth wonderful. Not at all hard and dry. So, I stopped off at that same bakery last month to buy some of that same bread. They had nothing anything like the first bread. I bought a couple of loaves that looked like the might be good but they were not even as good as the walmart bakery bread. So, I read up on sourdough on the net.
Thursday after work, I made the starter. Then, Saturday evening, I made the two loaves above. The recipe I took the hints from said to let the dough rise once, them make it into loaves, put in well oiled pans and put it in the fridge overnight. After 12 hours, place it in the cold oven, turn to 375 and bake for 1 hour.
About that recipe hint thing. Helen told me just recently she had read that the difference between a baker and a cook, was that a baker measure ingredients precisely, and followed the recipe exactly. I do not remember what she said a cook did, but I know that she was saying I do not follow recipe measurements or instructions. I has recipes are just helpful hints. For example, nearly all the sourdough recipes I found call for four ingredients; flour, water, salt and good luck. Well, good luck getting a good bread with that. If you leave out the salt, you have glue.
I added some whole wheat flour, honey and sugar [the recipe did have sugar in it], and margarine. It was really, really good, but it did not taste sour at all. I think that may be because my starter had not aged long enough. I am going to try it again without the whole wheat flour, with older starter [like maybe about Wednesday or Thursday] and let it rise a second time right away instead of putting it in the fridge. But, just the same, my bread was really good. It was just not at all like the bread I was wanting, but then, I knew when I used whole wheat flour it would not be like that.
A weed by any other name is a flower.
1 comment:
Larry's mom used to make it and it was good. I tried a few times..it was work.
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