I was wondering and wrote about it
There I was, reading through a pair of books I have. It was great. Then boom! Five books arrive at the library after weeks on hold. Lots of variety also. Two novels, two instructionals, a book of poetry. It’s heaven. If I could read at a normal pace.
We should always have problems like this.
Yes, it looks good. Thanks to #bakewithjack, I’ve got a second and a bit more experience and I can tell what is going on. Now onward to numbers three through five.
Water, flour, salt. That is all it takes from you to have a loaf of bread. There are also microorganisms. From wheat, air, or your skin, one or more of them have wild yeast and lactobacilli. Or maybe all of them have both of them. They do the big work of transforming a glop of water and flour into what I’ll be eating in a couple of hours.
I learned about how to do this from #bakewithjack. He, Jack, has a new bit on baking each Thursday. A bunch of them have been on sourdough. Including how to make a starter, what you see in the jar. He specifies the wholemeal rye as the source flour to use. But really, any flour will do. That video was my, ahem, starter in sourdough baking. His method is pretty fool-proof and it doesn’t waste anything – the cut the starter in half, pour the rest down the drain. That always put me off. Feeding a starter, throwing away half? What a waste! There’s another method also from Mike Greenfield about just eating the starter. That’s what scallion pancakes are for. But I prefer Jack’s method unless I’m hungry.
To get started you can watch Beginners Sourdough Loaf, Start to Finish. That covers everything. You’re referred to the “how to make starter” video. But everything else is shown in that video.
I’m now going through the pain of waiting for the loaf to cool so I can eat it. It’s just a couple of hours. I think I’ll watch 15 Mistakes Most Beginners Make. It’s from Mike Greenfield’s Pro Home Cooks. He has scads of videos on cooking. Great stuff.
Or maybe read about sourdough on Wikipedia. Another rabbit hole to go down into.
Well yippie for me. And yes, I do keep it up. It’s one of my Daily Do things I keep up. Like The One.
Yes, 20 booklets filled with writing. A rather long one this time, lots of skipping due to having a hunk of lung chopped out. I did, to my surprise complete four books. I wholeheartedly recommend all four.
And while I’m recommending, Morning Pages, from Julia Cameron, is also recommended. For people who want more creative work in their lives. It doesn’t need to involve writing or other things normally thought of as art. It does require commitment.
With the upper left node of my lung gone and I’m now 37 Days without a hospital visit. With both of those in place, I’m working on beating the 366 day streak. Yeah, yeah, I know that’s pretty normal. But for me, it’s big now.