Days 3-4 of sourdough were painfully uneventful, and then they got eventful, and then they crushed my spirit. The sourdough smelled beery, was frothy and everything looked just perfect for sponging.
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| That's frothy, right? |
Ingredients:
2 cups sponge (leftover goes in the fridge to be used next time)
3 cups unbleached flour (added 1/4 cup at a time, and you may need more than 3 cups)
2 tbsps olive oil or softened margerine
4 tsps sugar
2 tsps salt
So I kneaded it all together and placed it in a warm area- next to the back of my fridge. After I waited around for a few hours, I took a sneak peak under the towel and saw that absolutely nothing had happened. Nothing except the top dried out a little bit. I still had some hope, so I sat it out overnight, and still nothin'.
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| This smells like a frat kitchen. |
For the sake of just producing a loaf of bread, I decided to go the cheater route: packaged yeast (gasp!).
Ingredients:
1 pkg yeast
1/2 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
This mixture is supposed to double in size after 10 minutes, and it looked like it could have raised something like that much, so I tossed it in the dough, added 1/2 cup flour just to get it back to the right consistency and put it in my oven on the lowest heat possible. That was 170 degrees, and I opened it several times to make sure I wasn't baking, just proofing. This kind of packaged yeast is supposed to rise in just a few hours, but still, NOTHING!
Oh, brother! So here is my last-ditch effort of cheating. I'm baking this mother fluffer whether it proofs or not! I don't even know if it'll be edible, I just want some freaking bread! So then, I popped out my baking stone, which I've left into the oven for every single bit of baking I've done in the last week, and it is beautiful, and I poured the gloppy unleavened mess on it and stuck it in the oven. Actually, it sort of looked like pizza dough. This is what came out. Technically I failed, but it tasted great. Spread a lot thinner, I actually think this would be a perfect pizza dough.
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| *sniff* |
I have some starter remaining, though, so I still have a chance.
<3,
Megan
Here's the sourdough link I used.
ReplyDeletehttp://whatscookingamerica.net/Bread/SourdoughPancakes.htm
I kept my starter alive for a few months. Tried making some things, but nothing I made turned out as amazing as the McGuires' sourdough waffles. Sourdough is fascinating. It's interesting to me that the starter takes on the flavor of local strains of bacteria and whatnot.