Pushing up the daisies

Breadmaking! Yes I have been known to indulge in that most humble of cooking activities, bread baking, especially once I had been bought a bread machine.
Melanie over at beansprouts sparked an idea about making sourdough bread. This basically means bread that you make via natural fermentation, making a yeast starter that you leave out in the open till it starts to ferment, then keeping that starter and nursing it along to make bread batch after batch. This seemed quite interesting, so I thought I would have a go.
I read Melanie's articles: beansprouts
then found quite a good article on the net: Sourdough Bread: how to begin
I mixed together the flour and water as specified and kept it in a warm place and lo and behold, the next day it has bubbles!! (so I started it Friday night and on Sunday morning I fed it with 1/2 cup each of flour and warm water.) This morning (Monday) it had "hooch" (an alcoholic liquid) so I decided to make up a "sponge" with more flour and tonight I will try making a loaf. Maybe it was easy here because 1 I make a lot of yeast based stuff in the house as a rule and 2 in France people do eat a lot of bacteria-laden food like smelly cheeses etc, so maybe the air here is quite rich in that kind of micro-organisms. I am sure it won't look as nice as Melanie's loaves, made with much trial and error. If it's edible, I will be happy :-D

Labels: bread, recipe, sourdough