Baking bread

I've spent the morning baking bread. Sourdough, to be exact. I have tried over the years to make a good loaf of sourdough, and have had many problems getting the starter to work properly. Then I found the Tassajara Bread book, a bread cook book from a Zen monastery in originally printed in 1970s. It is very big on the sponge method of baking, where you mix some of the flour and the yeast etc together and let it sit to proof, before adding the rest of the flour and other ingredients. I had very good results with this as soon as I tried it. My bread looked as it came from a bakery, for the first time (usually the loaves taste fine, but look, well, amateur).

For this sourdough bread, you make the starter much as you do with other recipes, but when you get to the bread part, you mix the starter with flour and water, then let it sit overnight before mixing in the rest of the flour. I had a starter going in Texas, but something went wrong - maybe it was too hot, or maybe there were just some very funky yeast spores in the air - but the sponge always ended up smelling more like sulfur than sour mash or beer. I used it anyway, and the bread turned out OK, but not really good. So, I threw out that batch of starter when we left. This week I have been growing a new starter, and it smells just right. Last night I started the sponge, and this morning, it didn't smell bad! Wahoo! It was a bit thinner than the sponges I made in Texas, but since they didn't turn out well, that is probably a good sign. The loaf shaped up and rose nicely.

And, you ask, how did it turn out? Really good! It has a lovely color and shape, and it tastes like a nice, light sourdough loaf of bread. Much better than my last couple of attempts in Texas.