Sour-dough Starter: A Lesson in Patience.

   Hello again, I'm back. There hasn't been a lot going on recently, by which I really mean there's been a lot going on but I haven't actually finished any of it yet so I don't feel that I can post it. But I do have one or two things to contribute today. I was cleaning off my camera's memory card in preparation for the weekend (Tom has the weekend off and we're going to have adventures in Northwest Yorkshire) and I discovered a few photos I'd taken a while back with the intention of posting, but I never got around to it at the time and they were forgotten. Anyway, they're of my sour-dough starter that I attempted about a month ago and the resulting loaf of bread I made which has since been consumed.
   I've never attempted sour-dough before, this was my first go at it, but I remember my mom making it when I was young. We've watched The Hairy Bikers Bakeation over the past several months, Tom doesn't mind cookery programmes as long as they're a bit manly, and we've been inspired to try several of their recipes. They visited a sour-dough bakery at one point in the programme and it looked so yummy. Tom has never tried sour-dough before, in fact it's very hard to find here in the UK, probably because it's seen as a French thing and therefore unacceptable. But I grew up in Seattle with Ivars clam chowder in a sour-dough bowl, only the best lunch ever! But I had no idea how to make a starter and somewhere in my mind baking bread has always been filed under the 'extremely difficult, do not attempt' section. But within a week River Cottage did a feature episode on bread baking and to my surprise sour-dough was included with a step by step guide to making your own starter. It was the universe telling me it was time to give it a go.

My starter starting to bubble.

  Still apprehensive (I've never baked bread that's turned out right) I sought out some help on the internet, such a wonderful place. I stumbled on sourdoughhome.com and probably got more help and advice then I needed. In fact some of the advice put me off trying my starter from scratch, but I ignored it and went ahead. Just whole wheat flour and water. I got my flour from the back of my cupboard, my in-laws had picked me up some stone mill ground flour from a National Trust site in Surrey last summer and I hadn't known what to do with it, we don't really eat a lot of whole wheat anything around here and you can't really use it in cookies or Yorkshire puds, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to dig it out. The water was from my kitchen tap, just mixed into the flour until a slimy gloop formed. I covered it and put it on my kitchen windowsill where it would be warmed by the sun. Every day I scooped out about half of it, and fed it with a bit more flour and water and within a few days it began to show signs of life, little bubbles. By day 10 it was rising and doubling in size and I decided it was time to try some bread. Now, I'm not a very patient person, when I start a baking project I like it to be finished right away so I can eat it, I have a hard time waiting for cookies to come out of the oven, usually I eat more dough then actually gets baked, so waiting a week and a half on this starter to liven up was a huge test for me. but I made it all the way to day 10, yay!
   Now this is where I tend to go wrong with bread, and this time was no different. I added a bit of the starter to more flour (I used strong white bread flour this time so we'd get white bread instead of whole wheat) and kneaded it tirelessly for 20 minutes or so then formed it into round loaf shapes and left it to rise overnight. When I came down in the morning, instead of rising upwards it had risen outwards into a giant puddle of dough. It was bubbly inside, but wouldn't hold it's shape. So I tried again, kneading it back, adding a tough more flour and shaped half of it into a round and dusted it well with flour, hoping that would help it hold it's shape, and put the other half into a loaf tin. I baked the round after only a couple hours and it turned out alright. The loaf tin dough rose to the top of the tin quickly and I baked that straight after.

  My resulting bread was a bit heavy, this seems to be my biggest problem, maybe I don't bake it quite long enough, but it was sour-dough tasty and my husband loved it, so both loaves were gone within a couple days. I'd definitely try this again, and the whole wheat flour worked a treat (more natural yeasty bits in there), but I might try a different starter and bread recipe and see how it turns out, there's a wealth of different tips and hints online, just do a Google search.