Sourdough!

A picture of Chris and I on Easter Sunday last week :). We had a wonderful Easter weekend visiting my family on Saturday and Chris' family on Sunday. I LOVE being around my families!

So, the topic for this post is SOURDOUGH! A few weeks ago I captured 'wild yeast' in my kitchen and created my very own living sourdough starter. It sounds more exciting than how the actual process went down, but the outcome of a happy and bubbly starter was quite the happy occasion. Basically, I stirred together flour and water every 12 hours, and by the 5th day I had a bubbling starter ready to be used in baking. 

I have to say upfront that the secret to my success in making all of these sourdough recipes is the Sourdough A to Z e-book that I purchased from the people at GNOWFGLINS. It is $20, which may seem pricey for an e-book, but it is over 150 pages long and is unbelievably comprehensive. It has information about starting your own starter, a long list of resources and recipes, starter routines, and how to preserve your starter. I purchased the e-book along with 4 other e-books for a deal that was running a few weeks ago for $7.50. I was thrilled with getting such a good deal on such a comprehensive book. After using it frequently over the last couple of weeks, I wouldn't think twice about paying full price because it is such a great deal. I also plan on printing it out and keeping it in a binder in my kitchen because I am using it so often. Another thing I love about it is all the recipes give instructions for soaking/souring all the flour which makes for a much healthier end product. 

So, let me show you what I have done with my sourdough over the last couple of weeks. 

Pizza dough after souring for 8 hours. 

Kale and mozzarella pizza.

My first sourdough loaf! There is a long story about how things went down with this recipe. Basically it involves having a dough that was too wet, putting too much dough in the pan, and baking bread at midnight so it didn't overflow. It still turned out delicious though and despite cutting the rise time short there was a lot of rich sour flavor and a good crumb. I am amazed by the flavor with only flour, salt, water, and starter. 

Fried eggs and avocado on my first slices of homemade sourdough bread. Hmmm... so delicious. 

In the back (left) I have bread dough, the bowl on the right is for sweet potato sourdough cinnamon rolls, and in the front I have dough souring to make coffee cake. 

I let the bread go through it's second rise overnight in the bread pan and it over-rose and spilled out of the pan. Here are the remnants. The bread still turned out delicious, I just need to put less bread dough in my pan so it doesn't spill over. 

Even with rising all night and spilling over the pan, the texture is still really good. Look at all those air pockets! Next time I will just split the dough in half and make two loaves instead of one and I think that will fix the spillage problem. 

Blueberry sourdough coffee cake that we ate for breakfast this morning. It was very tender and flavorful without being too sour. I probably could have added a little more sugar as it needed a touch more sweetness. But I will definitely be making this again. 

Sweet Potato Sourdough Cinnamon Rolls. I made these for small group tonight, which got cancelled. So I haven't tried them yet. But they sure look good! 

Sourdough Crackers that are unbelievably crunchy and delicious. I brought these to our family dinner on easter and these were the few crackers that were left.  

I have also made 4-5 batches of waffles (that are just sourdough starter mixed with some eggs and butter and a few other things) and english muffins. 

Obviously sourdough started is a lot more versatile than I ever imagined and I have only cracked the surface of the recipes they have in the e-book. Things that I want to make soon include sourdough crepes, tortillas, gingerbread, pitas, and biscuits.