Trying My Hand at Whole Wheat Sourdough

 I have talked about it a bit, but I had a bad, bad experience with homemade sourdough bread. When I was in 7^th grade my mother, in her eccentric wannabe hippy days, decided to expose us kids to the Sourdough Experience.

You have to understand—I had really only eaten the low-end white bread for my entire life up to this point. It wasn't bad (to me), either, except for the pbj absorption problem with school lunches. But I digress.

I'm not sure why sourdough—although, come to think of it, sourdough was less work and expense than other traditional artisan loaves. [Nowadays “artisan” is a compliment.] But there were definitely some problems with our Sourdough Experience.

The first was the bread pan—it was too big for the amount of dough placed therein. After the big rise, the bread reached about halfway up the pan. This made for a decidedly short slice of bread—maybe 1 ½ inches. The sandwich made with this bread was an impractical size and the proportion of bread-to-crust was off. Plus it didn't fit into the baggie very well.

The second problem was the texture of the bread, along with the color. It was, well, transparent. I think it may have been that the dough was too moist, but whatever the issue, the bread was kind of see-through. And kind of a pale grayish whitish blueish. It was neither appealing to the eye, nor appetizing.

The third problem was that it was really, really sour. Our former sandwich bread was pretty much tasteless, so that made it inoffensive. Not so with Mom's sourdough. It was extremely offensive to the olfactory sense, my own and my classmates' as well.

Silly-looking, transparent, and smelly. But wait, there's more.

It freezes nicely!!

Peanut butter and jam, the lunchtime fare, does not go well with sourdough. Today I might try a savory combination of peanut butter and pickles or something like that on sourdough, or even something meaty. Pbj just didn't work with Mom's sourdough.

In my first marriage my husband always talked about his friend's great homemade sourdough bread, he just couldn't get enough of it. But I relived the traumatic 7^th grade year of lunches every time he brought it up. I knew in my head that there was good sourdough out there, but I just couldn't embrace the concept then, it being so fresh in my memory.

See recipe: myfamilyrecipes.livejournal.com

And then, just 40 years after the trauma (Really! That was 1972!), my friend Liz came along. Liz loves real food. And she makes all the bread for her family of 9: whole wheat sourdough. I got her recipe and method in October, when I had my broken ankle and couldn't entertain the thought of making anything, including the bed. Her instructions (she had taught a class) were so thorough and easy to follow that I couldn't resist the inner challenge. In April I went ahead and got some starter from Liz, and off I went.

Great slices--sandwiches look appetizing.

The first loaves were fine, but a little short—though not too wide because I appropriately used an 8”x4” pan. And when I offered some to my son, Zach, and his wife, Julie, I explained that it wasn't that great, not what you may expect, a little heavy, not like at the store, she chastized me: “It tastes just like sourdough, don't sell yourself short!” (God bless her.) And the rest of the family ate it all up.

And now I am a seasoned whole wheat sourdough maker!! And it's good! And pretty! With great color and a delicious crunchy and satisfying crust! And it makes excellent toast. 

Would you care for some starter?

Living a Week From My Pantry

Over the summer our cannery specialist noticed a challenge on one of the food storage sites I enjoy. The challenge would be sometime in September, and would involve feeding the family for a week without going to the store. During times of financial stress many years ago I did this on occasion, but I haven't done it in many years, with the storage I have now, with the husband I have now, or the child at home now. (I didn't even tell the 16-year-old.)

The challenge was to be sometime in the month, but we would get no warning, it would just happen. On the website there were many challenges within the challenge, and limitations and exercises each day of the challenge. I opted out of those, going only for living off our storage for the week, and not shopping for any groceries. The challenge began last week, and today is the last day. Yay!

I cheated twice. The first day we were out of milk, and hubby and son are cereal eaters. Dilemma! I had soymilk (a little, anyway), since I don't drink milk, so I was fine and offered to share. I went ahead and bought the milk, in the spirit of the peacemaker, and Allan abstained from it in the spirit of preparedness. No granola! He did well and ate a lot of hash-brown-and-egg breakfasts that he made himself while I was on my walk. He is such a man of habit/routine that I was surprised by this, but he is also faithful and flexible. It showed this week.

The other cheat was Saturday. Silas was to work for his soon-to-be-brother-in-law on a house painting project after our weekly trip to Port Orchard for a check-in. He needed to be at the workplace by 10, and generally doesn't eat before the PO trip. I bought him a sandwich for breakfast, not having thought ahead on that one. Oh, well.

All in all we did pretty well. I got out the crock pot and made 2 kinds of chili and tuna and noodles, all new recipes. I fixed homemade treats more than usual, since the granola bars ran out. We ran out of apples, a lunchtime staple, but lived through it. I made some homemade whole wheat bread, which I like to do anyway, but had to since we ran out of bread. Sourdough biscuits were tried and enjoyed. We have lots of butter in the freezer. There are blackberries on the vine right now around here, and my daughter's fruit trees are ready with plums and asian pears, so there wasn't a shortage of fresh fruit. We enjoyed a few things from the garden. I even did the unthinkable and got up at 3:00 am and fixed sausage gravy for Allan to eat before his leaving on a business trip this morning. I find that having purchased 1/4 of a beef last winter has really paid off, too. All in all it was a fortunate week to need to rely on what was around.

One of the things that made everything so easy is that we are almost empty nesters, and Allan is so easy to live with. He's just happy when there's dinner on the table! When kids were around, since we had the milk, it was no big deal--pretty much the way we live anyway. We did have an ice cream request last night, but we said no, that brownies alone would have to do this time. I did miss my weekly-ish date night, which usually consists of going out for dinner (and circumstances came up that would have precluded that date anyway). I also felt the pinch when I was out and about at noontime and yearned for a whopper junior. But that's okay, I don't want to be doing that anyway!