Real Bread Week is finishing today and I bet you are all wondering how we did…
Well, we did bake a loaf and doesn’t she look pretty! In this case though, beauty really is only skin deep…
..because that is where it ends. The results inside were far from good.
The Paul Hollywood overactive starter that we used simply hasn’t matured enough to drive the rise of a loaf of bread. We also had problems that when we fed it again (after it had expanded to three times it size) it seemed to go dormant again. It wasn’t rising and falling in the jar like a starter is supposed to.
So to date we have had no luck getting a starter to produce a good loaf of bread.
What we learned?
Mostly, that seemingly simple things can be hard. Creating something living (wild yeast) out of just water and flour is HARD! Make sure that you respect the baker next time you bit into your sourdough loaf. A lot of patience and care has been invested to create and to maintain the starter with which is was baked.
We also learned that getting a starter going, is sort of like having a baby. There are all these books out there helping you understand how best to do things, but at the end of the day none of these books really cover your child.
We also learned that getting a starter going, is sort of like having a baby. There are all these books out there helping you understand how best to do things, but at the end of the day none of these books really cover your child.
Same with sourdough starter recipes. There are so many variables. What flour are you using? What is the weather like? What is the temperature of your water? How big is the jar you placed it in? Do you bake bread regularly? (if so, then there already is yeast in the air). After a week of researching and trying to get ours going, we are understanding them a bit better. Sort of like the first three months with your baby. You are understanding why she behaves the way she does and how you can respond to it.
We also learned that we are becoming a wee bit obsessed with this project!
Please note, we are not discarding our efforts simply because Real Bread Week is finished. Oh no. This endeavor got us hooked on getting at least one starter of the ground preferably two.
Research
Doing more researched also shows that many people find it hard to get their sourdough starters off the ground. And the research pretty much all says to keep going; it will start! For instance, when reading through the thread of 1000s of comments left behind on the tartine recipe blog that we followed, it turned out the writer of that recipe also took close to a month to get her first ever starter going.
Once we have concluded the experiment either successfully or not we will publish a story of our individual experiences
For now, we will leave you with some more primordial mixture shots 😉
