aptk's blog

Today I'm making straight up sourdough bread. I use a very wet starter which I keep in an old clear glass coffee carafe. I was a bad sourdough momma and had to revive my starter, and I now believe it's all the way back.

After making my bread dough this morning, I fed my starter 1 cup of flour and 1 cup of water, because I need enough sourdough for pancakes tonight. After I fed it and stirred it all up, I had a little over 4 cups. Three hours later and it's bubbling happily away, is now showing about 8 cups and smells wonderful!

The pull apart bread loaf can be made with many things, it all starts with a buttered 10 X 16 piece of dough.

HERBS

Use your favorites! I generally use parsley, with a little cilantro, oregano and chives. If I'm serving it with chicken, it's parsley, chervil and rosemary. For an Italian meal, it's garlic, onions, basil.

Or you can go sweet, sugar and cinnamon. Or maple sugar, chopped apples, and cinnamon. You can get creative.

I grew up in a household where bread and butter was served with every meal. Now granted, it rarely was a nice, warm home baked bread. More likely than not it was either Rainbo or Wonder brand sliced white bread from the corner store. Today I still like bread with almost every meal, but I've made great strides in seeing to it that it's a home baked bread.

Yesterday I had a big bunch of starter and two baking plans. One was an artisan loaf, which totally failed, it didn't hold its shape at all, I ended up with a 10 in round disk that had such a crust you could hardly cut it. Today it is bird food out in the back yard.

The second project was the cinnamon rolls, flavored with orange zest, sprinkled with cranberries and walnuts in addition to my regular cinnamon roll fare, frosted with a cream cheese orange glaze, and it's delicious.

Bread, the world over, takes many forms. And in the American Southwest this is one of my favorites, the sopapilla.

Now, technically, I understand that this is not a loaf of bread. But psychologically, this perfectly fits the crispy, flaky crust while still being "light". it's a giant air bubble covered with light, flaky crust. You can sprinkle it with sugar, or drizzle it with honey, you can open a corner and fill it with whatever your heart desires, you can sop up your favorite soup or stew, so for me anyway, it's close enough to bread to BE bread.

Yesterday my goal was to start the task of revitalizing my sourdough starter which had spent most of the summer in the fridge being ignored. I know it makes me a bad sourdough mom, but it's coming together now that there's snow on the ground and I hunt for reasons to keep my oven on!

Found this recipe lurking around on this site and just had to try it. IT'S PERFECT!!! Quick, easy and a delightful companion for my home made chicken soup.

My picture shows four subjects, the bread ready to go in the oven, the bread just out of the oven, the bread torn by hand into pieces and the soup it went so well with.

I will have to stock up on flour as I envision myself finding many more recipes to try!

I will admit right here and now that I have been a BAD sourdough caretaker! My sourdough starter spent most of the summer in the fridge being fed intermittently. But now there's snow on the ground and I wanted some sourdough pancakes so that I could sample some home made wild raspberry syrup. My starter was like "whatever...", so I figured that since I use sourdough starter for flavor rather than rising power for pancakes, I'd give it a shot. And they were delicious pancakes and the raspberry syrup was to die for, but I noticed that my starter had very little action to it.

I'm new to this site, just found it yesterday while I was surfing around looking for sourdough ideas while my yeast bread rolls were rising. Love the site and now on to my comparison.

I made a batch of my favorite white bread yeast rolls. I wanted to see how different scoring and glazing would affect the crust of the rolls. Specifically, I'm looking for a very tender crust that's easy to chew without messing with the texture of the actual bread.