This was homemade sourdough bread.
We have a new pet - sourdough starter. J gave it to me for my birthday along with the
popover mix and pan. I like sourdough bread. It's one of foods that I hadn't had in Japan. Sour bread sounded strange to me. However, once I tasted sourdough bread, I became a fan of the unique flavor! Once in a while I thought of making my own sourdough bread and buying King Arther Flour's sourdough starter that seemed very popular. J helped my thinking to be realized. First we needed to feed the starter. I fed our baby starter according to King Arther Flour to make it ready for baking bread. It took 36 hours!
We wanted our first sourdough bread to be pure sourdough bread. I mean, no yeast. There are many recipes of sourdough bread that add yeast. I will try such recipes later. For pure sourdough bread, I adapted
a recipe from a lovely food blog by Emilie, the clever carrot, because she provided a very detailed beginner's guide for baking sourdough bread and pictures of her sourdough bread were absolutely gorgeous! My dough was easy to handle. I wasn't sure how much the dough was going to rise in the oven. So I divided the dough into two and made two bread.
Tada! They, especially the left one looked just like one in the picture on the beginner's guide! It was baked in a Dutch oven according to the guide. I didn't have extra Dutch oven, so the right one was baked on a baking sheet. I tried to keep steam in the oven, using hot water so that the right one could rise well. Well, it didn't look too bad, but using a Dutch oven was definitely effective.
The crust was so crispy! The inside was lovely soft and moist. The texture was wonderful.I think I did right.
It tasted like sourdough. It was sour but not overwhelming. We both liked the level of the sourness. Our starter did a good job! I am so glad we have adopted the sourdough starter. Now our starter is sleeping in the refrigerator. What shall we bake with it next?
