Sour Dough





Yogurt Sour Dough Starter

 I've begun a journey.  That may take a while.  Both Dear Darling and I are bread lovers.  We would eat it everyday at every meal if we could, but for us, it is not healthy, so we only try to eat it on the weekends.

Both of us like sour dough bread, so I thought I would try to make some.  How hard could it be?

Starter bubbling away

 Having never made it before I began my journey.



Sponge

It's not quite as simple as making a loaf of bread in the bread machine.  PLUS it helps if you read the directions of the recipe from start to finish.  There is a lot of waiting with making sour dough bread.  Not only do you make the starter that you feed for 3 to 5 days, but then you make a sponge which takes over night.

Salt and Baking Soda

After I had stirred down the sponge, I added the salt and baking soda.  You can see the two separate clumps in the photo above.  I learned this trick from my mother, this way, should I get distracted while making something, you could look in the bowl and see what you had already added preventing any additional amounts of ingredients. 

 

The recipe said to cut the dough in half and then half again.

Then to place two of the halves into the bread pan and let rise again, for about three hours.

 

As you can see, they are cute, little loaves.  They didn't rise very much.  They were more dense than we would have liked them to be, but for a first try, they came out okay.  I guess it's one of those things I will be trying to perfect with trials and time.