PANCAKES!

Ok, these aren't sourdough, but they are delicious!  Make them and eat!

3TBSP white vinegar
6oz greek yogurt
8oz milk

Mix these together and let them sour (at least 10 minutes) while you mix everything else.

1c flour
1tsp salt
1tsp baking soda
1tsp sugar

Whisk dry ingredients and then add the following:

1 egg
2TBSP melted butter
and the soured yogurt & milk mixture.

Whisk just until mixed.  Cook on a hot skillet!

Confession time

My starter died.  The weather got a little warm here and I didn't keep up with it.  My starter went from good sour to questionable sour and then I abandoned it for a week and it turned into a mold farm.  Oops.

But because I have become accustomed to home-baked bread and cannot wrap my mind around paying for bread, I caved and made bread with jarred yeast!  I've made several loaves now and it is delicious.

I felt like such a cheater, but I guess I am still making bread.

they can't all be winners

I baked a really gross loaf today.  I couldn't even take a picture of it.  It was dense, drippy, and disgusting.  I'm going to throw it outside and see how long it takes to disappear.

Grilled cheese on cheese bread

Grilled cheese on cheese bread.  Of course.

Sourdough cheese bread

Sourdough loaf with cheddar cheese:  always a winner!

Bad Bread

This loaf did not turn out well.  I had to soak the pan for a few days to release the bread, which then got tossed in the dumpster.  Also an example of why it is good to ALWAYS take notes as well; if I knew what I'd done, perhaps I wouldn't repeat it.

Rye rounds

Rye bread!  40 of these little rounds for a friend's Baba Yaga show.  I used a recipe from The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones, though I substituted dark beer for the coffee.  When I was doing test batches, I successfully made bread with the ingredients from the recipe using my starter instead of the yeast, but for the show we used jar yeast because of time constraints.  There will be more rye bread in my future!  And not just because I bought a 25 pound bag of rye flour!

Coconut milk bread

This is the finished coconut milk sourdough bread.  It was one of my all-time favorites.  The crust was great; the bread was rich and tasty.  The golden smears are bits of saffron.  I will make some version of this bread again.

Coconut milk sponge

Hmm.  I was feeling experimental yesterday, so I used coconut milk as the liquid in the sponge.  It smelled pretty good.  When I uncovered it this morning to add flour, salt and do the first rising, it smelled . . . different.  Sort of a little bit like hard boiled eggs.

I don't know how it will turn out.  There will be a follow-up post.

Sourdough with some oats

Regular old sourdough.  I threw in a handful of steel cut oats.  YUMMY!

Olive bread

This was another loaf with disastrous beginnings.  I used some vegetable smoothie (carrot, garlic, beet green, red pepper, celery, lemon, cucumber, quinoa, green tea) as part of the liquid in the sponge.  In the dough, I added kalamata and green olives.  

I rolled the dough out into a lovely, perfect rectangle, sprinkled it with the olive chunks, rolled into a tidy bundle, and put in into a warm oven for its second rising.  

In my haste to create a delicious loaf, I forgot that this was actually only the first rise.  And I forgot about my oven ooze from just a couple days before.  So once again, I woke up to a bread dough mess, but this one was much worse since the dough worked its way out of the pan and all over the racks and element.  

Though it was a mess, I thought I should try to save the dough, so I scooped what was left from the pan, kneaded, and put it back in the cast iron loaf pan to rise at room temperature while I was at work.

I threw it in the oven when I got home, still dubious that it would turn out.  Amazingly, it made bread!  And it tasted a little like pizza! 

Back in the bread!

I am back in the bread habit.  I took a little break so I could shrink back into my pants and started keeping my starter in the refrigerator so I don't have to feed it everyday.

Here is a loaf I made that I thought wouldn't make it but turned out to be one of my all-time favorites.  I used potato water as the liquid and a warm oven for rising.  For the second rising, I put the dough in a 4.5 quart dutch oven and left it overnight.  In the morning, I woke up to a huge, sticky mess that completely filled the oven and adhered to the lid.

I pulled the lid off, sliced the top, threw it all in a hot hot oven, and expected a deflated mess.  To my surprise, the bread stayed tall and the crumb was very open - much closer to my goal of huge holes!

And it was GOOOODD!