The Recipe I Started With

Here is the recipe I received way back when.  It is short, precise, and totally sufficient… for someone who has made bread a million times.  For me it was totally inadequate, but a great starting point.  Here goes:

Measures for 3 loaves:

6 Cups of flour

¼ Cup of sugar

1/3 Cup of oil

1½ Cup of warm water

1 Cup of Starter

1½ Teaspoon of salt

Mix all the ingredients together in a large, non-metallic bowl.  It will make a sticky dough.  Coat the dough with cooking oil and turn it over a couple of times to get all sides coated.  Cover the bowl loosely with a damp towel or with plastic wrap. 

Let it rise several hours.  4 to 6 hours, maybe more, depending on conditions.  Turn the dough out on a floured surface, divide into thirds, and knead each third until springy and stretchy.  Form into loaves and place in greased bread pans.  Coat with oil and cover loosely with plastic wrap or a towel.

Let it rise again.  4-6 hours, maybe more.  When it’s ready, bake for 10 minutes in a preheated oven at 350°.  Turn the temperature down to 320° and let the bread bake for 20 minutes more.

When finished baking, remove from the oven and turn out onto wire racks for cooling.

There!  That’s the recipe I received when I started making sourdough bread.  Some of you are asking, “How do I make a starter?”  Good question.  There are several methods.  One is to mix water, sugar, and potato flakes in a bowl.  Cover the bowl with one layer of cheesecloth and leave it sitting out in a warm place for several days.  Stir it several times a day.  After a few days the mixture should get all bubbly and smell, well, yeasty.

Another method is to mix the above with a pack of yeast.  Same method as above.    This one works more quickly and almost without fail.

One last point: the starter is really a medium to keep a fungus alive.  Yeast provides the fungus.  If you start out without yeast you are going to try to capture the fungus from the air, hence the cheesecloth instead of plastic.  You want microscopic fungi spores to filter through, but you want to keep visible bugs, which will remain unnamed, out.  Good luck!

I Love Sourdough Bread

I love sourdough bread.  That’s how I got into this mess.  A whole bunch of years ago, my dear wife began making sourdough bread using a starter that was fed with sugar, water, and instant potato flakes.  It was soooooo good!  The aroma of bread baking – then cooling on the countertop – was just the best thing ever.  Well, until you sliced a hot loaf, so hot you could barely hold the top while sawing with the knife; so soft you couldn’t really get a normal-sized slice.  So sad, those big thick steaming slices of bread with butter slowly melting on top.

We lived in a pretty small house at the time.  It was an old structure transformed from a little country store into a home and moved by placing two logs under it and dragging it with a tractor to a new spot.  All this happened before I saw it, but the stories lingered around it.  It belonged to my in-laws, who graciously allowed us to live in it when we were first married.  We heated with a wood stove and opened the windows wide in the summer to slow the onslaught of heatstroke.

Now, Sherita, my wife, had to endure months of nausea every time a child was on the way.  This precluded much time spent in the kitchen.  As the cooking assignment fell more to me, our first child and I endured a lot of “spaghetti-O’s” and similar delicacies.  By the time we were expecting our third, I determined to be a better cook, and that has made a big difference over the years.

One of the things I missed was the sourdough bread.  Taking the bull by the horns, I tracked down a starter.  If memory serves, a nice lady was willing to leave a jar of it on the trunk of her car for me one day.  Her good directions led me successfully to the property – and the starter.  I took it home and began to feed it, thinking of the terrific bread we would enjoy.  MMMMM-mmmmm!

Sadly, my early efforts, though tasty, were less than what I desired.  They were much better than canned ravioli, but that leaves the bar pretty low.  To make a long story well, long, it took several years of making bread to achieve some kind of repeatable result that was worth repeating. 

I’m an accountant by training and a man by the miracle of genetics, so linear thinking is how I roll.  After many flatter-than-expected loaves, loaves without the soft texture sourdough can give, and loaves with other deficiencies, I began to eliminate variables in the recipe.  The recipe I started with was probably written on and index card (if we could afford such a luxury back then).  Today, when I share my recipe, it requires about eight pages to print out. 

With years (yep, you read that right – years) of trial an error I began to get a result I could be proud of.  The time could have been shortened if I had thought to ask others for advice.  Two ladies, a mother and daughter, moved to Mount Airy from California and opened a bakery.  I spent some time with them and got some good ideas in the process.  So, a well-deserved nod to Beverly and Randi Heddick!  Thanks, you guys!

Sourdough bread here in North Carolina has a different taste than the famous San Francisco sourdough.  (More on that in another post, if I ever get around to it.)  Sourdough here is soft (oh, so soft), has a milder taste, is a little sweet instead of sour.  The same amount of flour that makes two loaves of yeast bread makes three loaves of sourdough.  With care, the texture is close-grained (a term from my woodworking activities – I don’t know if it means anything when you’re talking about bread) but still supports the structure of the bread. 

That starter I received so long ago, retrieved from the trunk lid of a car of someone I didn’t even know, has served me well for these thirty years or so. This blog is the result of my kids’ desires to give me another venue to spread the gospel of sourdough bread.  If you’re still reading, thanks.  You must be a special soul.  My next post will actually contain the recipe.  The next post will contain my recipe.  I hope you’ll find it worthwhile.