Saturday, March 21, 2009

Sour and fulla fiber!

So I keep stalling on posting about bread. I have so many old "fresh baked bread" pictures piled up now that it's crazy. It was one of those "I want to wait til I have time to post a recipe, or at least the full story about how I worked up this bread recipe."

Yeah, that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon... Oh well - screw it. Here's some bread I made recently, using the King Arthur Flour sourdough starter I've had going in the fridge for awhile. I started off with the King Arthur Flour basic sourdough recipe (included on their web site and it comes with the starter), and decided to have a little fun with it...


But I swapped in whole wheat flour, unprocessed oat bran, potato flour, millet and some slightly-boiled wheat berries (I have all the measurements written down somewhere). Because this seemed like it would make a heftier bread, I also upped the amount of yeast that works with the starter for leavening.


The bread TASTED really good. But it was also really hefty....with a good hearty chew. Maybe next time I found find a way to add a bit more leavening? Either more yeast, or more rising time? Oh well - it tasted good plain, and was also great toasted for tuna salad sandwiches!

2 comments:

Peter said...

I bet it would also be tasty alongside some homemade soup, maybe smeared with a little butter.

Jeph said...

You're right, this is the perfect kinda bread to have toasted and with soups.

So I think I'm letting the sourdough die off. There's no way I'm gonna want to keep up with it, feeding it every week, etc. When I DO want to make bread, I feel obligated to make only sourdough breads to use the starter... I can see how maybe "in the olden days" this would've been something easier to keep up with - people ate A LOT more bread back then. But nowadays, even though Brett and I aren't on a low-carb diet of any sort (CLEARLY not!), that' really is a LOT of bread!

So it might be RIP sourdough real soon. There are a lot of recipes where you make your own starter/sponge/poolish like the day before you're going to make the bread - and that ferments and builds up flavor and leavening strength...but it's not something you have to "keep alive" in your fridge, feed all the time, etc.