Sourdough Bread

A disclaimer I'm not always going to post about bread, but it was really a start in my kitchen for playing around.  I love sourdough bread! Several years ago I started my own starter.  The recipe calls for just water and flour.  It is amazing how hard it is to get water and flour to make sourdough starter.  Many of my efforts went bad, skunky smell and pink starter, yuck!  My sister-in-law mentioned Rose Levy Beranbaum's  The Bread Bible.  I followed her directions and it worked.  I've used the same starter since 2008 and her name is Caroline after Ma Ingalls in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Series.

I'm not going to share the recipe here, but please consider this book if you ever thought about making other breads as well.  I usually make sourdough every 3 weeks or so. If I let it go too long it gets a little sticky, but it still makes a great bread.  The loaf is small so I usually make 2. One for now and one in the freezer for later.

This is what the bread looks like the first day sitting in a 1 cup plastic bowl.

This is day 2 almost ready to bake.

The final product.