Sour Dough

This year I decided to try my hand at making sour dough bread. I felt inspired by some friends and acquaintances of ours who keep a starter going and regularly turn out beautiful loaves of fresh bread! My friend gifted me a small amount of her starter and coached me on how to get it fermenting and growing. At the beginning it was a bit confusing knowing what to do, but after about a week it started to make a lot more sense!

Now, a couple of months on, I have adapted the starter-feeding and bread-making routine to suit our family’s schedule. It’s actually very easy, and very flexible! While there were a few *interesting* loaves to begin with, some tweaking of the baking times, temperatures and equipment soon ironed out the issues. Now we enjoy the odd loaf (when I get time) and have even tried sour dough flat bread and pizza. It’s pretty amazing to be able to produce lovely, soft loaves of bread without the need for store-bought yeast! And the wild yeasts contained in the sour dough starter created a lovely unique flavour in the final product.