Sourdough Boule

Holiday Sourdough Boule, best of three

As mentioned, I had a lot of baking planned for Friday.  I took the day off and had lofty plans to bake a couple of loaves of challah as well as the three loaves of sourdough that had been growing in my kitchen in stages over the previous three or so days.  Last week was a rather long week and I was tired and decided that getting some extra rest was more important than the challah and my three loaves of sourdough would have to do.

If you like bread and you haven’t heard of Peter Reinhart, go buy one of his books.  His approach to bread making may be a bit intense (the bread recipes of his that I have tried usually involve developing the dough over several days) in terms of time commitment, but you will find yourself devouring every bite of bread you can get your hands on and having to fend off a flock of appreciative food vultures the minute anyone has a taste of your bread.  I own Crust and Crumb and looking forward to checking out his new book, Artisan Breads Every Day, which is supposed to take his techniques and give you recipes that take a less time consuming approach.

The sourdough starter that I use was actually purchased via mail from Breadtopia at their Baker’s Store.  It arrived in the mail in a little ziplock baggie with instructions for bringing it back to a healthy state.  My starter is the refrigerator sort, which means it can hibernate for months in your fridge with minimal to no tending and then be revived when you decide you want to make bread.  I take it out of the fridge two days before I want to start my bread recipe and start feeding it and storing it at room temperature.

I used Reinhart’s sourdough recipe, which calls for making a firm starter, which gets its own set of rise and retard (holding the dough at a lower temperature for an extended period which lets more complex flavors develop) steps, then the dough the next day, baking happening on the third day.  The first time I made this recipe M and I devoured an entire loaf as soon as it was cool enough to eat.  I think we took all of about ten minutes to consume it.

For now I will leave you with another bread photo (courtesy of my cell phone of all things).  The time has changed and fall is solidly here – go home and bake bread!