I ended up taking a little hiatus from making sourdough bread. I’ve been working on feeding my starter to make it happy again. This is my first successful little loaf in a while, and it was sooo good. We tried this recipe, which was enough resting and rising time to give a good sourdough taste, but it was low maintenance enough that we didn’t need to check on it all day.
We’ve been testing different sourdough biscuit recipes. I wake up a tiny bit earlier, so I’ll have time to mix up a batch after our morning run. This part is crucial for controlling leftovers. No one in the office will turn down a warm, homemade biscuit first thing in the morning.
Our favorite biscuits are the super flaky ones, but we are still perfecting our ideal recipe. In the meantime, we need to stock up on more jam!
This is a walnut bread. It always happens that we run out of honey when making bread. In my head, molasses is also a sticky sweet substance, so I usually top it off with that.
I was super impressed with how well it puffed up. Its proofing box magic.
These turned out a little blurry, but it looks like a legit slice of bread! With the little ridge on top and everything. Just like the professionals.
And then we made some super awesome grilled cheeses!
You know that cinnamon swirl bread with the raisins? I love that stuff. This is a little bit like a sourdough version of that. The dough has raisins and walnuts, then it is cinnamon-rolled up, and baked into bread.
The cinnamon-rolling process. I can’t resist a little taste of the cinnamon sugar.
In my head sometimes I’m like- this bread has to sit here for 30 minutes, so I might as well keep busy and make something else while I wait. Then all the sudden I am taking cookies out of the oven and trying to do 6 things at once while making a huge mess.
Can you see the swirl??
Halfway through the year, and we already baked up (at least) 12 loaves of sourdough! Sticking with this project feels like an accomplishment, since each loaf takes quite a bit of time and care, or at least the time to remember its there and to move on to the next step! Really makes you appreciate the work and love that goes into a good loaf of bread.
This week, we made a raisin rye sourdough bread, and tried out my new diy proofing box!
Our new proofing box! Which is actually just a large tupperware container. After an hour proofing at room temperature, I boil some water in a little mason jar, then put the bread and the jar into the tupperware, and close the lid up. The water is supposed to make it a bit warmer and more moist, to help with flavor and rise. By no means a controlled environment, but we are working up to it!
For a rye bread, I would say we got some pretty good lift out of it! I also think it is one of the prettiest loaves of bread we have made so far. We gave it away as a gift, but we received very good reviews! Excited to make a loaf to keep soon so we can try it for ourselves.
We tried to make sourdough bagels, but they didn’t really turn out exactly as planned. I rigged up a proofing box out of a tupperware container, and they looked like little pillows until we tried to tear them away from their new friends. I think the dough should have been more dry. At least they were still good enough to eat! We are definitely going to get back up on that bagel horse soon.
We saw some really excellent looking focaccia bread at the store last week. I spent a couple minutes thinking to myself if sourdough focaccia was a thing, then consulted the internet, and the result was yes, it is a thing.
I loosely based my focaccia experiment on this recipe here. It was mostly cloudy outside, so it didn’t rise as much as I was thinking, but there will be no problem at all putting it in our bellies. Put some pesto and cheese on this, and call it dinner.
I’d like to show you a picture of my latest loaf of bread, but this is all that’s left.
jk, There is still almost half left. We aren’t monsters.
This recipe is somewhat my own concoction, pecan sourdough bread. Its based on a recipe for walnut bread, but we have a lot of pecans, so I wanted to use those instead. We also ran out of honey, so I subbed in some molasses instead. Smelled sooo good while it was in the oven, and our toast this week has been on par. I think next week I might try some spelt bread, or some other kind of cool kid grain.
This week’s bread was oatmeal bread. The recipe made two loaves, and we decided to make both, and give one away. Unfortunately, while in the dough proof, one loaf stuck really badly to some plastic wrap, and the dough deflated some after I tried to gently remove it. So we graciously gave away the round, attractive loaf, and kept its less attractive, but still tasty, twin for ourselves.
I would also like to add that this bread was ginormous. Together, the breads took up an entire sheet tray.
This week we made sourdough English muffins! A little bit of change from the normal loaf we have been making. It was actually a little more arm work than the normal loaf though! It wanted 6 1/2 cups of flour and kneaded and rolled out! Great arm workout.
I used a little bit smaller biscuit cutter than recommended, and I ended up with one million muffins.
I opted to cook them in the oven. I’ll try it in a skillet next time though.
Once they cooled down, I put a whole bunch in the freezer. No one person ever needs to eat 11 English muffins in one week, even though that would be delicious.
guy and his girl 