In search of healthy and fun meals to feed my family, with an eye toward sustainable living.

Here you'll find recipes & ramblings about keeping my family fed with what's available in Alaska between local produce, a little bit of wild harvest, and the modern grocery store.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

SLOW sourdough bread-baking

We're eating our first loaf of retarded bread (a.k.a. Two-day-bread) -- it did turn out good!
Definitely more sour than without the retarding. Retarding is the way to go if you like your bread authentically sour!

Here's what I did:
Day 1: started sourdough bread (recipe here) and gave it its first rising.
Given that this recipe had no added yeast, and that the house was not nearly as warm as on Sunday morning with a nice fire going in the woodstove, this first rising took a couple of hours.
I punched it down, kneaded a bit more, wrapped it in plastic, and placed dough in the frig to "retard" for the night.

Day 2:
Took dough out of the frig mid-morning. It took many hours to warm up and start rising again -- something like 4-5 hrs. Again, no woodstove blazing, just a relatively cool kitchen while we were all at work/school.
In the afternoon, I punched it down (still felt cool!), shaped it into 2 loaves, and set on the stove to rise. Again, this took longer than I anticipated, and I did not get this bread baked until after dinner. Still, it was yummy!

Lessons learned: this is SLOW bread, not much work, but got to think ahead!
Next time, I should take dough out of frig first thing in the morning (before the High Schooler's run to the bus stop!) if I want to serve bread with dinner! At least in ALASKA during February....

NOTE: This was a white bread loaf, so I suspect it might be even slower for a mixed grain loaf.

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