fresh baked sourdough bread!!!
 

This is some fresh baked sourdough bread made with my own starter and some just churned butter!! Simple but so awesome. The bread had an incredible crusty chewy crust with a soft airy interior crumb.


Rick

That is a beautiful loaf.....it's been a long time since I had homemade sourdough bread. It just doesn't get much better than that!

I'm powerless around bread and cakes and could make the whole loaf disappear. Very nice work, it's beautiful.

The bread look spot on and just as good as any professional.
Too bad I dont care for sourdough bread.
To me it tastes and smells like a soured dish rag and I have tried it many many times and even been force fed it.:lol:
I wish I could like it but I cant.:(

Worth

Worth you most likely would have enjoyed this bread. My starter is only a week old so not sour or tangy at all, with no smell other than that of fresh baked bread . To me natural sourdough bread means its naturally leavened without commercial yeast and doesn't necessarily have to have that sour or tangy taste. If my starter is really strong tasting I will sometimes add honey to reduce the tang.

Rick

Rick

[QUOTE=ricman;651402]Worth you most likely would have enjoyed this bread. My starter is only a week old so not sour or tangy at all, with no smell other than that of fresh baked bread . To me natural sourdough bread means its naturally leavened without commercial yeast and doesn't necessarily have to have that sour or tangy taste. If my starter is really strong tasting I will sometimes add honey to reduce the tang.

Rick

Rick[/QUOTE]

I might I would hope so.
I was offered a starter from Alaska that supposedly dates back to the Alaska gold rush and turned it down.
I had one here that went back close to 30 years my wife started and tossed it after she died.
I couldn't bare the memory of it being in the house.
Now I wish I hadn't.:cry:

Worth

That's a great looking loaf!

I've been experimenting for the last year or so with trying to make my own starter. I like the tangy taste and finally got one going that I liked by feeding it spelt flour. The taste was as I like it, but the crumb was not. :( Time and again I ended up with cakey crumb bread, just annoyingly crumbly although really tasty. :bummer: I just recently gave it up and made ordinary bread last time, did not save any "mother dough" to culture.

Looks great! And thanks for the reminder to get my starter out of the fridge and revive it. It's been almost a year since I did anything with it and with summer here and my work hours down, I'll now have the time to bake again.

I know everyone says it must be fed on a regular basis to keep it alive, but once mine hit about the two year mark, I found I could feed it and stash it in the fridge for at least a year and it would wake right up with another other a feeding. It's now about six years old. I just poured off the "liquor," scraped off the greenish top to reveal the nice cream colored starter below, and mixed in 1/2 cup water and 1 cup of flour. I'll know by tomorrow if sleeping beauty will wake from her slumber.

I'm already craving sourdough pancakes.

[QUOTE=bower;651442]That's a great looking loaf!

I've been experimenting for the last year or so with trying to make my own starter. I like the tangy taste and finally got one going that I liked by feeding it spelt flour. The taste was as I like it, but the crumb was not. :( Time and again I ended up with cakey crumb bread, just annoyingly crumbly although really tasty. :bummer: I just recently gave it up and made ordinary bread last time, did not save any "mother dough" to culture.[/QUOTE]

spelt flour is lacking the gluten it takes to form "chains" in the dough. no gluten = no chains= no texture like wheat flour with gluten gives.

[QUOTE=clkeiper;651512]spelt flour is lacking the gluten it takes to form "chains" in the dough. no gluten = no chains= no texture like wheat flour with gluten gives.[/QUOTE]

Thus the reason many recipes call for flour in cornbread.
You want a good bread use 50% semolina in it and the other half ((Bread)) flour NOT all purpose flour.

Worth

Thanks Clk! I googled and you're right, although spelt does contain some gluten :" . the [B]gluten[/B] in [B]spelt[/B] has a different molecular make-up than the [B]gluten[/B] in modern wheat. It is more fragile and more water soluble, which makes it easier to digest." Apparently well digested by the sourdough culture. :( I thought since the bread was mostly wheat flour there should be gluten enough. I heard that spelt was a good feed to get a sourdough culture going and it seemed to be... but maybe rye would be a better choice. Or use the spelt in tinier amounts, just to make a small culture. :?!?:
I don't know when I've seen rye flour anywhere, for maybe years... :surprised: Back in the day it was easy to make interesting breads with all the grains that were available. But the 'natural foods' market has now moved to the supermarkets. :evil: This means they have a small section - and a limited selection. The specialty stores are hard to find, or just gone out of business.

You can buy rye flour till the cows come home here.
Worth

Mail ordering from King Arthur used to be the only way you could get flours other than wheat around here. Now the flour sections in the grocery stores have just about anything you want, including a whole array of gluten free options.

And my starter is starting to wake up! It survived another year of total neglect.

I find that odd, we could buy rye flour here in the stores over thirty years ago even in small towns it is nothing new.
I wonder why that is?
Worth

I try to bake a lot of bread. More in winter than summer. I am going to try sourdough just for the heck of it. When I bake my own I actually add gluten because it tastes better and the texture is much better. I really don't understand the rise of the gluten free fad. From what I have been able to read, testing for gluten intolerance is fairly difficult and can be expensive.

The number of gluten free products have exploded to take advantage of those who equate gluten free with healthy. Just a decade ago, gluten-intolerance levels were at 1 in 2500 worldwide. Today, it’s at 1 in 133. Is our food system and all the preservatives causing a problem we didn't use to have? Or are too many folks just jumping on a bandwagon.

A few years back there were no peanut allergies to speak of, no milk allergies and not many wheat allergies. Now its seems like everyone either has or wants to have an allergy. Still less than 1% are gluten intolerant. Hopefully I will be able to continue to eat the bread I bake and not become one of the 1%.