It's been a long while since I posted anything here. There are reasons for this, some of which I can mention here. I did write a couple of drafts on things I have since almost forgotten about, but I want to get to point of this ... sourdough.
I enjoy cooking and baking and have devised a very successful (IM not so HO!!!), if long-drawn-out version of ciabatta, which I covered in an earlier post January 2022. I have given up the egg wash as it seemed a waste of an egg! The main thing is getting the oven hot enough, which with current energy prices can seem wasteful, but I try and time baking with other oven uses ... usually moussaka. More of this later.
My partner has Parkinson's and has also developed a malignant cancer which has occupied a lot of time - surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and now immunotherapy), but eating is something she enjoys, so I keep fiddling about to provide tasty things. A while ago I became interested in sourdough, to the extent of buying a couple of books which should have led me to Nirvana. All they did was warn of failure ... everything was so complicated - temperatures, feeding, flours ... blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I did make some ferment (this is flour+water which has become bubbly) and found I had some 3 year-old rye flour, so I tried out some rye sourdough. It worked - the bakes looked good and the one I didn't try to knead came out nice and holey (LHS in pic).
The downside is that rye flour is incredibly gooey and cleaning up is very difficult. But, what kept coming back to me was that the ferment looked rather like the results of the first stage of the ciabatta making. Mulling it over at 5am (my usual time for mulling). I decided to treat the ferment just as that first stage. So one morning I took 375gm of ferment and put it in the breadmaker pan and added the contents of stage two: 1/4 tsp of fast-acting yeast + 325 gms strong white bread flour + 1/2 tsp of sugar + 4tbsp of olive oil + 1 1/2 tsp salt + 90 ml water. This is then put on a dough programme for 2 hrs 20min. I then made up some small and medium rolls (no pix!) and cooked them in a max. heat oven for 12 minutes. If I didn't know, they could have been the old-style ciabatta. Tasting a roll, the slight sourness of sourdough came through!
What this post is really about, 'though, is how simple it is to have the ferment ever ready for baking.
I never got round to finishing this piece. The last date associated with it is October 2023. Now, in June 2024, I am reflecting on how the title of this blog has run its course. In the first piece on this blog I describe my relationships a little. Now, change is here again as cancer has taken Pauline.
A fuller update to this blog will follow.
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