I've mentioned my husband's sister a few times on this blog. She is a year older than me, never leaves the house without being totally put together (no throwing on sweats and schlepping up to Walmart for her). She's into yoga, manifesting things from the universe, and is extremely conscious of what she eats and drinks. She lectures us all on "the dirty dozen" and reads labels on everything consumable that she buys. She's like a vegetarian without really being a vegetarian. We tell her constantly that we don't think she eats enough protein (meat), but she ignores us eats meat maybe once or twice a week, and drinks her daily smoothies with her properly sourced plant protein.

One of the highly anticipated food items at any family gathering in our family is my sister-in-law's bread. My husband's brother's wife makes it, and we all love it. My husband's healthy sister is as much of a bread fiend as we are. However, at her house, she only eats sourdough bread and when Aldi runs out of it, it's a crisis. She extolls the health virtues of it and how beneficial and easy to digest it is. 

I decided that maybe this bread would be more diet-friendly and healthy so, I guess I have to try and make it....

As you have probably heard, you need a 'starter' to make sourdough bread. I believe you can buy some, but I decided I was going to try and grow my own. How hard could it be?  It's just a process and you just follow directions, right?  I'm good at that.  Because I like to do things right, I decided to go to my favorite (only one I know of) bread expert, The Great British Baking Show's Paul Hollywood. 

I Googled (naturally) "Paul Hollywoods sourdough starter" and found a website that explained how to make Paul Hollywood's sourdough starter. Sourdough starter is basically flour and water that, over time, interacts with the bacteria that naturally occurs in our breathable air (so I guess you can't grow it in a clean room -  these things occur to me at times....) and ferments. The instructions for this starter, however, told me to grate an apple, including the peel, and mix with the flour and water. Huh..... okay... wasn't expecting that.

I got the flour and water mixed and grated the apple, only to realize that, after I'd (stupidly) grated it directly into the flour and water, that I'd  used the shredder part of my cheese grater and not the grater part. Don't ask me why I didn't sacrifice that small bit of flour and the apple (an apple I brought home from our apple trees at our camp) and start over. I don't know why I didn't... I had more flour and apple, so I have no excuse.... I did pick out the larger chunks of apple and thought eventually the mixture would 'eat' or dissolve the smaller ones.  Apparently if you feed it enough, this mixture is supposed to 'double' which I think means it puffs up to double the volume but not weight.

No one tells you that growing a sourdough starter is like having a child. You have to watch it and feed it like clockwork. No one tells you it can take five days up to over two weeks. No one tells you that you will throw half of it away every single time you feed it. I hate waste so I was not very happy to learn this. Naturally you can use 'discarded starter' to make a variety of things that are not great to eat on a diet... like pancakes, cakes, other types of dessert items. Paul Hollywood's recipe allowed me to let this concoction ferment for three days without doing anything, which was great. His directions required me to leave it until it had bubbles by discarding half of the mixture and feeding it with flour and water.  His recipe called for a very large amount of starter for a sourdough loaf (note that I didn't realize this until after I looked at other recipes for starter and bread that used only one-fifth the amount his loaf called for). 

I have to mention that I went to the farmer's market during this process, and spoke to the young lady who was selling sourdough bread. She was surprised at my starter recipe and feeding schedule and informed me that she fed hers every 12 hours when growing it. And there was NO apple in hers.  She also told me signs to watch out for (which I clearly forgot--see below). 

I guess the first problem with my starter, that should have given me pause, but didn't, was that my dough was a little pink (thinking back, the lady at the farmer's market TOLD me about this, and I forgot). I didn't pay it much mind when I noticed it since I had grated a red apple, including the skin, into the mixture. Yeah, that wasn't the cause. The second problem was -- and I can't believe I'm sharing this -- was the little pile of black fuzz growing on one section of the starter. In my defense, I did what people do with cheese. I just scooped that area out with a spoon and noted that the rest of it looked fine (yeah, no, it didn't), determined to make that damn loaf of bread. After a total of five or six days (it's all a blurry haze now...) I finally decided the starter had grown enough and decided to make a loaf of bread. 

The dough was a bad consistency, not stretching like Paul said it should. You should be able to pull it and it stretches but doesn't break and make holes (like windows in the stretched dough). I watched his YouTube video on actually making the loaf. I shaped it wrong, put it wrong side up for the long cold prove in the refrigerator (remember I said I could follow directions?) on a tea towel that wasn't floured nearly enough so the dough stuck to the tea towel (I'm guessing there is still dough stuck to it even though it's been washed and dried) and I probably forced all the air out of the dough trying to get it unstuck from the tea towel. Total. Freaking. Catastrophe. 

I think it would have made a great comedic video except for all the cussing going on in my kitchen. Meanwhile, my husband with the broken heel, who must keep hit foot elevated, cannot help me as I'm covered in gooey dough with a nasty tea towel trying to figure out what to do. 

Because I'm stubborn, I carried on a made a loaf. It actually tasted better than it looked. It was way underproved, so it didn't rise enough and was dense. I baked it way longer than the recipe said because it never felt done (and still looks very undone). I finally gave up and took it out of the oven. We all tried it, liked the taste but the consistency was all wrong.  It would not get any browner and is way flatter than it looks in this photo:

I threw the remaining starter away.....

I pouted about it for a week.....

And began another starter (because I'm stubborn) a few weeks ago. Yes, two weeks. The directions said it can take up to two weeks, so patience is important. Only this time I tried a different starter recipe that used less flour and water (113 grams of each) and NO apple.  I also ordered a sourdough starter jar off of Amazon (see link below). This starter, however, had to be fed every 12 hours. Ugh. See? It is like having a child! I used up a lot of bread flour and plastic grocery bags to dispose of the 1/2 cup or so of gooey starter at every feeding. After two weeks, I decided it was ready. I don't know if it actually doubled but there were a lot of bubbles in it.  Tonight, I started the looonnnng process of making another sourdough loaf. 

It's fairly basic, a mix of flour, water salt and starter. I used a food scale and measured everything by weight. Then after you mix it, it has to rest for a half hour.  I then had to feed the starter because that's what you do when you use some. I used 100 grams so I fed it 50 grams of flour and 50 grams of water. After the dough rests for 30 minutes, which allows the water to hydrate the flour, you have to do this folding thing where every 30 minutes you stretch one side of the dough up in the air and fold it the middle, turn the bowl a 1/4 turn and stretch and fold again, like the dough was a square and you are stretching and folding all four sides. Then you let it rest 30 minutes. You do the fold thing three times and after the third time, you have to let it prove (rise) anywhere from six to twelve hours or until it's doubled. 

I made a mistake by starting to make this at 5:00 pm. Yeah, I'm screwed if it reaches its peak while I'm snoring away at 3:00 am.   You don't want to let it over ferment, either. So, right now it's in my oven with the light on and a bowl of warmed water to keep it a bit humid in there. The ideal temperature is between 75F and 85F. My meat thermometer tells me it's 81F in there. That should be the ideal proving temperature.

I decided it had proved enough in the oven when I saw air bubbles coming out of the top. It didn't take six hours. It was barely two. I didn't want it to over-ferment, so I took it out and shaped it by dumping it on a floured surface and folding the edges to the middle, in effect creating a ball with seams on the top.  Then it had to be transferred to a bowl for the long, cold prove in the refrigerator, which would take 12 to 16 hours.

Instead of ruining another tea towel, I did something I saw in another sourdough recipe. I greased the bowl and floured it to prevent the loaf from sticking. I put the ball in the bowl, seam side up (because when you roll it out, onto parchment to bake it, it will be seam-side down.)  In the refrigerator it went.

I checked it first thing in the morning when I woke up. It looked like it hadn't risen much, so I was worried. Then decided I'd followed directions well enough so I would wait the 15 hours. I ate breakfast, went with my sister-in-law to yoga (yeah starting yoga this year is worthy of a blog post) and didn't think about my bread while I was contorting my body like a pretzel. 

Funny thing about directions. You should read them through to the end. The next step was to heat a Dutch for an hour at 550F degrees. I didn't even know if my oven could get that hot. Luckily, it could. However, I did not have a Dutch oven. I did have a turkey roasting pan with a cover that had an enamel-ish coating. I figured that was close enough. I liked it better than my other options because it had handles. 

The parchment paper burned, which I wasn't expecting. I didn't think that would hurt anything. I baked it for 20 minutes, took the lid off the pan and baked it for another 15 minutes. It looked really good when I took the lid off, so I was encouraged. After another 15 minutes, this was the result:

It tastes good, has air bubbles in it and the crust is crispy. I think the bottom got over done in the oven, probably because I had it too low in the oven in order be able to fit the roasting pan.  It doesn't have as much flavor as the previous loaf I made, but the consistency is way better. I think next time I'm going to prove it longer on that first prove and I'm going to use my big Corningwear square glass baking dish with the lid, unless Santa brings me a Dutch oven for Christmas.