This Christmas was a baker’s dream for me. I got all variations of supplies from my family to dive deeper into sourdough. Until now, I’ve been making either discard recipes or the “cheater” boules recipes for soup bread bowls. Now I have a Dutch oven, bannetons, slings, and lames to go with my new stand mixer and starter jars.
The First Recipe
Having all these new toys to try, I searched up sourdough recipes involving a Dutch oven. The highest rated to come up was by Farmhouse on Boone. This recipe uses a mix of three kinds of flour: all-purpose, bread, and whole wheat.
The Process
We fed our starter the night before with high hopes. Even though I started Fro-dough back in November, he never did start doubling. He’d just rise a little and fall back down. I think this is why we ended up with a somewhat flatter loaf at the end.
We followed the rest of the recipe as closely as we could manage. The dough never seemed to hit the benchmarks like the recipe set out. It was always flatter and sticky. We’d do our stretch and folds, and our dough would be a ball for a little while. But come the next round, it’d be back to a sticky puddle. We bulk fermented in the fridge overnight but in the morning the bread still wasn’t ready for baking. Maybe our house was too cold, but it wasn’t until 10:30 PM that it finally resembled a bakeable loaf.
The Results
We carved out a hope filled “First Loaf” with the lame after coating the loaf with a homemade rice flour. (We looked up how to make our own since we couldn’t find any in a nearby store. That was a problem on its own- I don’t recommend it.) We threw it in our preheated cast iron and sent it to the oven with best wishes.
It tasted great! It wasn’t perfect but I’d consider it a good first loaf of sourdough. Hopefully we get better with each try!
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