Wednesday 8 March 2017

Well...This is Demoralising ...!!

They say practice makes perfect...well I certainly need a load more practice because take 2 is a darn sight worse than my first attempt... Yes I am a dreamer and the tantalising smell of freshly baked sourdough with a crust that cracks to reveal a beautifully cooked loaf is what I am trying to achieve...perhaps I need to aim a whole lot lower !!  It looked so easy at the cooking class and Georgie produced magnificent loaves even after all of us had stuck our fingers into it and seriously overworked the dough... I am definitely doing something wrong at the very beginning of the process.. possibly I need to investigate the whole 'Hydration" thing again.  Sigh.. !!


Baked two boulders... one on the left was shaped in a banneton ...not that you can tell.
What a sad sticky dough it contained... and dare I say flat as a pan cake.
 Thankfully the daily visit to the vegetable garden gives me way more pleasure than my baking efforts.. picked the first of the pumpkins today..also getting passionfruits from a vine I only planted last year... Maybe I should just stick to gardening.
I fill this basket each morning with goodies from the garden.. 
 The abundance of fresh produce from the vegie patch always leaves me with the problem of using them up...I do give lots away but really think I could utilise way more if I only knew more interesting ways to prepare them.   I received Maggie Beer's Harvest cookbooks for my birthday...there is one for each season and has some great recipe's  and ideas to use your own produce...very timely I think.

Hopefully these will generate fabulous ideas to use up my home-grown produce.
I will get back to the sourdough drawing board...I'm deflated but not yet beaten....the dream of making my own delicious sourdough is still flickering...  hopefully it won't be snuffed out by take 3 !

7 comments:

  1. Good luck with your third batch, Suzie. I haven't mastered ordinary bread yet, so sourdough is not on my radar yet. Meg:)

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    1. Thanks Meg...I am starting to question myself. It may just be something I will never get the hang of. :-)

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  2. Keep trying, it is all a learning process.
    A site called "Nourishing days" has a post about good sourdough starter health, that might help......have fun trying

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  3. You are doing better than me! I gave up on sourdough after my first try! All the work in making the mother and then failed bread, I'll just stick to ordinary bread.

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  4. I think Sourdough is a real life commitment....not sure I will ever have that commitment. Keep trying though.

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  5. It took me a year to get a decent sourdough loaf. So many factors. I now prefer the no-knead method as it suits sourdough so well. You just need to think 24 hours ahead tiz all.

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  6. Dear Suzie, my flop wasn't bread. It was toll-house cake. Had looked so forward to it as it baked, went into the livingroom to just rest my eyes. Some 90 minutes later...yeah, it was a dark brown rock. Was so disgusted, walnuts and butter and (supposedly) free-range eggs aren't cheap. Oh well...

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