Behold!
Sourdough is amazing. I made this dough a little too soft and let it raise a little too long. The loaf pan is a small cast iron pan we got from Lehmans at half off. We love it...you can put it places that are too hot to raise bread with normal loaf pans without the bread starting to bake prematurely.
It developed these funny ears that were easy to break off and eat as separate loaves. I took one for lunch (and breakfast) during my last drill weekend.Any baking endeavor you can do with dry yeast you can do better with sourdough, of this I am firmly convinced.
The trick is to activate your sourdough culture before you use it...and you don't have to let it sit out overnight. The pizza and bread loaf above were started the afternoon prior to cooking them...I just added some somewhat hot water to bring the sourdough batter up to lukewarm...added some sugar and whole wheat flour, let it set for a few minutes, then added the rest of the ingredients to make a dough. From there, treat as a regular yeast dough. For the brewers, it's the difference between adding dry yeast from a packet and using an activated yeast culture from Wyeast or whoever.
By the way, if food like this looks good, then give us a visit! The wild leeks have been out for about a week, I think in one to two weeks the bulbs will be worth harvesting.
Your bread sure has lots of character.
ReplyDeleteThat is just like a movie I made up.
ReplyDeleteThe monster creature slowly rose to power and popped out of the oven!