Brag Post - My Wife's Sourdough
My home is now a House of Fermentation. House of the Rising Yeast? Oh god, there's a bread pun right there and I didn't even do it. House of the Rising Bread. We are fermenting our pants off over here and it's been a lot of fun. I have made a lot of beer recently, too, but I'll save that for another post because the purpose of this post is to brag about my wife's amazing sourdough. I can't bake for shit; I do a quick no-knead bread that I've had success with but outside of that, I'm just not a baker. Don't let that recipe site fool you; her post is very long because well, all food blogs are these days but also because people had a lot of questions about her methods and she added to her post to be very thorough and answer them.
The bones is you put some yeast in warm sugar water, let it proof, then mix in flour and salt and stir. Then you let it rise, use forks to punch the dough back in on itself, then seperate in half and put each half in a buttered bread pan. It's the easiest bread recipe on the planet and it comes out amazing every time. But it's just one style of bread and it's particularly versatile. I love it with an over-easy egg (let's be honest, I love just about anything with an over-easy egg), some smashed avocado or on the side of some soup but it's not very versatile outside of that. My repertoire when it comes to baking is just extremely limited. I can cook just about anything, baking is too much of a science for me. Baking can also be art but it has to be science first. You have to follow the directions, you have to do everything a specific way and that's not really my jam. Even with beer I deviate and experiment.
But my wife can literally do anything if there's directions. She is a directions-follower. We cannot cook together because my slapdash mix&match method and her "no-it-says-to-cut-the-carrots-into-one-inch-pieces-it-has-to-be-one-inch-pieces" method drive each other up the wall. But if there was a detailed manual for building a rocketship, she could build a rocketship. So she's been making bread recently quite a bit, beautiful challah, gorgeous baguettes, just delicious everything and decided to take a foray into fermented dough or as everyone else knows it: sourdough.
To make sourdough, you put water and flour into a receptical and let it sour. That is, you let lactobacillus from the air get in there (that's what makes it sour) along with yeast that is naturally present in the flour (that's what makes it rise). You do not add yeast to the mix; it's already there. You just give it what it needs to propagate and do its job. This sounds all very simple but she had tried this before and the "mother" (the established colony of yeast, bacteria, flour and water) never got a foothold, never got active. This time, it took twelve days. For 12 days, she babied the flour and water, keeping it at precise temperatures, feeding it twice a day, checking on it constantly. On the 12th day, the mother was bubbling and growing. It was time to make sourdough. And make sourdough she did.
Following methods from Flour Water Salt Yeast, she transformed those ingredients into beautiful, delicious sourdough bread.
Sourdough English muffins:
And while I don't have pics of it, she also made sourdough pizza dough and has plans to make sourdough pretzels. How lucky can one girl be, eh?