Adventures in Baking

Pillsbury and King Arthur should give me a commission, considering the amount of flour I’ve gone through in my pursuit of sourdough bread.
I’ve at least stopped trying to create a starter, a long process that requires a cup of flour at a whack daily (or if you listen to King Arthur, twice daily), discarding and re-feeding until you achieve something bubbly enough to lift that dough.

          My starter is still a bit wimpy but it can’t hear my disparagement, tucked as it is now in a corner of the fridge. Both of my baking attempts so far have produced edible loaves, although they have the density of a Civil War cannonball. When you eat a slice, you know it. Maybe that was the idea – bread with the heft you needed for weeks and months of walking alongside that Conestoga wagon.

That's my starter lurking in the background. The tomato is there for scale so you can see how little and cute the loaves are

          Not wanting to sacrifice six cups of flour to what might turn out to be a doorstop, I cut the recipe in half and baked it in cutesy little loaf pans. The bread was okay, but had an odd flavor due, I think, to the weirdly large amount of sugar called for.

          On my second effort, I used a different recipe calling for no sugar, and I added some whole wheat flour in place of ½ of the white. It had a better “sourdoughy” flavor and the color was more interesting, but afterwards I remembered from my early bread baking days cookbooks’ warnings against using all whole wheat because it doesn’t rise as well.

          I noticed that many of the sourdough recipes out there also call for yeast, in my opinion defeating the whole idea. Yeast is still the unicorn of the grocery shelves, bringing great merriment to the clerks when I ask for it.