Nice catch Catmandoo! Would you mind relating your homemade sour dough recipe on the forum? My family is crazy about it, whenever I travel to San Francisco I buy a dozen loaves and ship them home ahead of me...guess I could keep doing that online, but would love to experiment with making our own out on the Green Egg. Thanks in advance!
TJ -- sorry to take so long to get back to you. Life is just kind of busy right now. It is really difficult to put fish and pond related issues 2nd or 3rd priority.
Lynda and I have been making a lot of different kinds breads for many years. We both come from families that did a lot of baking.
I'm currently at my work condo (Ye Olde Folks Home) for the week, where I'm never really without two kinds of bread concoctions in my refrigerator.
There certainly are many ways to make sour dough bread. But, one of the best and simplest sour dough bread explanations can be found at this site:
Sourdough Bread. It is basically what I use, and this guy does a much better job of explaining than I could.
Because of neglect in feeding the starter, I do have to restart every 3 to 9 months. I also use commercial dry yeast to make sure it quickly starts, but the starter quickly takes on its own characteristics.
My other preparation uses great recipes we found several years ago through Mother Earth News from Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François. It really revolutionized what we do. Here are a couple of links to some of their work:
Atrisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day The 6-3-3-13 Rule. Every day, the dough evolves to a different flavor. After about two weeks, it takes on a great sour dough flavor.
This couple has a fantastic book called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" that I highly recommend to anyone interested in making old style European breads.
One additional thing I do, that is different from most, is that I bake my bread in a cast iron Dutch Oven within a conventional kitchen oven. I put an empty Dutch oven in the kitchen oven, and I turn the temperature up to 400 degrees.
When the oven gets up to 400 degrees, I take the Dutch Oven out of the kitchen oven. The bottom of the Dutch Oven gets dusted with coarse corn meal to keep the dough from sticking to the bottom. Then I plop in a dough ball. Usually I put a couple of cuts in the top of the loaf to keep it from deeply splitting. It goes back in the oven, with the cover on the Dutch oven, for about 30 minutes. This basically steams the dough, keeping it soft and moist. I remove the cover from the Dutch oven, brush the top of the loaf with butter, and continue to bake (uncovered) for about another 10-15 minutes. This method provides extremely soft and moist bread with very crispy crust. I dump the loaf out, let it cool for about 10-20 minutes, and then enjoy.
It is bread that doesn't get a chance to dry out and get stale.
Enjoy,
Ken
