Sourdough adventures

Last year I tried making a sourdough starter. It was difficult. I had to do a lot of research into why it wasn't working. Fortunately I found out it wasn't working for many many other people and that there was a solution. There are a million different recipes for making a sourdough starter. Here is the one I used from the Fresh Loaf. It worked like a charm and I have a wonderfully bubbly and sour culture going.

The hard part now is finding a recipe that works for me. So far I've made three rounds of bread and I'm just barely happy with this third round. The trouble I'm having is with the final rise during the proofing stage. Sourdough takes much longer to rise then commercial yeasted doughs. My culture is still really young and takes about 10 hours to rise up. Then when I go to shape it into boules for baking it doesn't want to rise again. So I'm getting rather low loaves of bread. Here's the lastest bread.

The crumb is much nicer then the previous two batches. At least it has some holes in it. The other two batches had no holes at all. The taste of this bread is great. Delightfully sour without being overly pungent.


The next recipe I'm going to try tomorrow or the next day is the Norwich Sourdough from the Wild Yeast blog. I also found a great troubleshooting post from Heartland Renaissance. I'll be using many of her tips to try and get my final proof to rise up a little more.

 Last but not least are these cheesy sourdough crackers! I made them yesterday and already they are gone. These also come from Heartland Renaissance. Oh my, these crackers are amazing. Even better if you make up the dough the night before and let them sit, the flour is soaked in the sourdough starter and thus you get healthier crackers.

I have so many sourdough things to test out now that I have this culture in my kitchen, cookies, crackers, muffins, sweetbreads. The this is really endless. And of course there are a million different sourdough breads to try out!