Sourdough bread attempts

I always have toyed with the idea of baking my own bread. And why not , given the abysmal bread culture here in the United States. Most of the stuff you get from the supermarket has about as much taste as the plastic wrapper it comes in, even if you pay premium for premium brands. You can go for artisan bread from the bakery but now it really get expensive. Besides, even the artisan bread doesn't taste like home, like when I was young, living somewhere in the German province.

Well, toying an ides does not by itself produce any bread, something more needed to be done. As in:

• Get or make a starter culture, either from bread yeast available from any supermarket, or by producing your own sourdough starter from scratch.
• With the starter at hand, make a dough. For beginners, only use starter, all purpose flour, a little salt, and water. Let the dough rise, form a loaf of bread, then let is rise a little more.
• Bake the bread. That would be at 400°F, until the outside was golden brown. By then, the inside would hopefully be done as well.
• Let the bread cool, eat, and enjoy!

So the first step was to make a starter. A starter is basically dough that's been fermented by and is full of highly active yeast. The idea is that you make dough by mixing the starter with additional flour and water and let it sit for a couple hours for the yeasts in the starter to take over the entire dough, rising it and filling it with tiny bubbles in the process. Once the starter has done its thing you use most of the dough to make bread, and keep a little bit as a starter for the next time.

The easiest is to make the starter from any type of baker's yeast available in the supermarket. It's a little harder to go for sourdough. The hardest part with the sourdough is not following the instructions but the long wait: It can easily take a week until the starter is ready. And while the wait drags on it is hard to tell exactly when the sourdough is ready. I figured it out now, the hard way: If you are not sure the sourdough is ready then it is not. It will be hyper active when it is. Like turning dough into running, bubbly, mush within a few short hours!

As I said, I learned that the hard way, by baking a couple of breads from sourdough that definitely was not ready. Impatient as I am I was too ready to take a small rise in volume as full fermentation of the dough. The bread I wound up with was still spectacular, though for all the wrong reasons.

I dubbed my first attempt the "cannon ball". Not so much for its shape but rather for its density. Even just opening the crust turned out an exercise in ingenuity. My biggest and strongest knife did do the trick when applied to the crust's weakest spot, seen on top, next to the spoon. Even then I was using the knife more like a chisel than a knife to get the trick done. Also note the strong coloration of the crust which served as a reminder I meant to buy that water spray bottle that the online recipe was taking about. And by the way, that spoon in the picture is a teaspoon.

I launched my second attempt one day later, now armed with a brand new spray bottle. Since the sourdough starter was only marginally farther along at the time the result suffered from similar problems as the "cannon ball". While this bread had about 30% more volume than the "cannon ball" it was still plenty dense. And while the water spraying kept the crust from getting burnt it did not keep it from getting hard. Very hard- I did not name it "the turtle" for nothing.

Tonight, three full days after the turtle I made the next bread, with fully bubbly sourdough starter this time. Resulting in the "balloon": At at least double the volume of the "turtle" it has just about the density that bread is supposed have. The crust still feels a little hard but no longer like a turtle shell. The crust broke up in two places and I believe it is because my dough was too dry- which would also explain the hard crust. Anyway, what's beneath the crust should be good this time, and I cannot wait for the bread to cool enough to try. I am confident my mouth won't be sore from the chewing this time!