Our First Attempt at Sourdough Bread

In pursuit of the healthy diet, Mum has been experimenting with sourdough starter (from Cultures for Health) in order to make healthier bread. In case you don't know much about the health benefits of sourdough, let me just say that its better for the digestion as it has already broken down important nutrients that the body needs, as opposed to yeast bread that is harder on the body for many different reasons. But lets not get into the science of it just now.
Mum used an easier, less knead recipe by Serene from Above Rubies. Here's the link to the video if your interested: part one and part two.
 Here's a picture of the process:

After "kneading" it for five minutes, more or less, Mum scooped it into two glass pans. Normally we use metal bread pans but we weren't sure if baking it in metal would hurt it. They say that keeping your sourdough in metal containers or stirring it with metal spoons kills the good bacteria and we didn't want that, so until we could find out whether it hurt or not we placed them in glass ones. Mum wasn't too keen on the odd shape it gave the loaves but I liked it. Different shaped breads look more gourmet, I think. Then she covered them with a towel and left them for 7 hours.

Later we realized that the towel was not a good idea because it stuck to the bread underneath. So the towel came off and was replaced with parchment paper. Unfortunately, the bread needed more room to rise and therefore ended up dripping a little down the sides and deflating a little. On the other hand, it had risen beautifully before that and would have made a nice rounded loaf if it had had more room. Lesson learned: split it between three loaves instead of two. If you watched Serene's video you'll notice we did not get 6 loaves but two (and as I said, next time will be three). On our first try we didn't want too many so we decided to split the recipe. It worked out fine.

Then, after baking it for an hour at 350 degrees, we were able to enjoy a delicious piece if fresh, truly sour, and healthy, sourdough bread. A success! It was soft and moist except for the crunchy outer crust. Perfect! I loved the stronger flavor compared to your average yeast bread. Great for sandwiches, I'm sure.

Until next time...




~GoldenSails