Baking the Bread

Since before the pandemic started I’ve been giving sourdough bread a solid try. It’s mostly gone well overall and I get a loaf in the oven once a week, maybe once every other week. Getting the original starter going was pretty straight forward. I followed along on this method from blessthismessplease.com and it worked out just fine. I’ve kept it alive since and it seems to have matured quite well. Like I’d even know. I don’t worry about feeding it on some strict schedule. It’ll go weeks some time in the fridge and it springs back just fine with a bit of feeding.

My go to recipe is from the same website, a pretty basic recipe that’s always turned out well. My rise times are not even close to hers – I usually have to let it sit for a full 24 hours. Over time I’ve gotten even lazier, I just mix it up once and come back a day later and see how it’s gone. It’s a lot of time, but certainly not a lot of work.

Harder in the summer

Oddly it’s been easier in the winter – last summer I had the hardest time getting the dough to be anywhere near shapeable. I don’t know if it would just rise too fast, but it too often turned into a sloppy mess. I’m looking forward to trying again this summer with some better bread flour to test if that was the issue. Could just very well be the heat.

Blossoming the flour

Nice pun there punk. I really do want to start branching out from this recipe. I made some dinner rolls for Thanksgiving last year and they turned out pretty good, I think. But it takes actual research and following a recipe… which are not hard things but the weird thing about sourdough, and maybe the hardest thing, was getting the timing down right. Some breads want you there every hour for half the day, which flys against my lazy-man attitude towards this thing. But still… there’s other breads out there man. Go bake them.