Sourdough is Making Me a Sour Woman

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.  

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'.

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.

*sniff*

I have some starter remaining, though, so I still have a chance.

<3,

Megan

Extremely Gross Banana Bread... Maybe

I tried to make some banana bread today.  I've made it before, but never well.  So when I found this banana bread recipe labeled "Extreme Banana Nut Bread," I thought it might help me add a little moisture and density to my bread.  Little did I know...

The recipe explicitly stated that I could use either white or brown sugar, so I decided that sugars would be the subject of my experiment.  

Ingredients:

2 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup butter

2 cups sugar

2 cups overripe mashed bananas

4 beaten eggs

1 cup chopped walnuts

I made two half batches and used white in one and brown in the other.

Already, I noticed that both batters looked a little... clotty.  Gross.  But I hadn't added any flour yet, so maybe it wasn't a total loss.  So I crushed 1 cup of walnuts in a Ziploc bag using the coffee cup crush method.

I suppose you could use a rolling pin, but this is way more fun.
Let's go Preds!

I mixed the flour and nuts into the batter, put the batter in greased & floured pans and popped them in the oven for 1 hour & 15 minutes at 350.

I won't waste your time.  The breads were equally clotty, and the color was the only difference after they were baked, except that the brown sugar loaf needed to be baked an extra 30 minutes. The taste and texture were indistinguishable.  And they would not release from the pan.

That was my opinion, anyway.

The husband; however, woke me the next day by saying, "I don't know what that is you baked last night, but it was delicious."  Despite not recognizing it as banana bread at all, he ate half the brown sugar loaf.  I asked if he liked Tapioca.  He said yes.

For my next sugars experiment, I would also like to make a bread with a 50/50 white and brown mix, and another one with cane sugar.  I fully expect the cane sugar to flop, and I don't want 4 loaves of banana bread around the house, so that will have to wait for another day.  Really I don't know when that will be, because after forcing down a slice of each, I have no desire to make more banana bread.

<3,

Nutmeg