I know I’m not the only one baking up a storm. You can’t find yeast. Flour is in short supply. There really is something to that theory of reaching back for comforting smells and tastes when you are going through troubling times. And there are not many aromas more comforting than bread baking in the oven.

As I’ve told you in the last couple of weeks, I have never explored the wonders of sourdough so I felt it was high time to try my hand at it. Bread has been around longer than metal. Our earliest ancestors baked flatbread from the grains they gathered and ground between stones. Egyptians recorded the use of leavening in both beer and bread. Wild yeasts have been used since before the written word. 

Sourdough starter is created using nothing more than flour and water. Wild yeasts are all around us, but specifically they are on the wheat berries themselves. When they are ground, the yeast spores ride along in the flour. Mixing the flour with water gives the yeast food to grow on. The acids produced by the fermentation process are what gives the bread its distinctive sour taste.

Making sourdough bread is a true labor of love. You nurture the starter, feeding and babying it every day with just the right amounts of nutrients. I actually bought a kitchen scale…something I thought I would never in this lifetime need. Now I can’t imagine not having one. I use it for everything. Every morning, you stir up your starter and discard all but four ounces. Then you add four ounces of lukewarm water and four ounces of unbleached white flour or whole wheat or pumpernickel…depends on your recipe. Stir it well. I place a sandwich bag over the jar and poke a few holes in it so it can breathe. Then, you do it all over again…every morning. It really is becoming second nature.

I mixed up the beginnings of the bread on Thursday night, covered it with plastic wrap, and placed it in the fridge overnight. Then I took it out yesterday morning and started playing with it. It was a good ten hours before I had two hot, crusty loaves fresh from the oven. We could hardly wait to cut into it and slather on some butter. It wasn’t as sour as I expected it to be. I still need to work on this, but I was really pleased with my first batch.

In the meantime, I mixed up a batch of yoghurt and set it up to culture overnight. Today I need to make a blackberry pie with the berries I picked up this week. We are having a cold front this weekend, so puttering in the kitchen is just what the doctor ordered. It’s the perfect escape and it fulfills my basic need to nurture and feed those I love. While things begin to open up around us, we continue to stick close to home. We are healthy and happy here. 

We’ve been camping all week out in the field here at the Ponderosa, but I conceded defeat last night. I agreed to sleep inside since it was supposed to be down as low as the 20’s by daybreak. Probably tonight, too. It will soon warm up again and later in the week we can get back out there in TOW-Wanda and camp. 

If you are interested, here is an excellent recipe for sourdough bread. There is a link at the bottom for a recipe to make homemade sourdough starter.

❤️

“Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.”

Ecclesiastes 9:7 ESV