Sandy had asked me to put together a recipe for the sour dough corn bread. So, here it is more or less.
This gloppy stuff is my starter. It began life as a loose bread dough yesterday. I didn’t measure, but I think I may have started with about two cups of water, a teaspoon of yeast, a table spoon of salt and one of brown sugar. Most of it got turned into yesterday’s excellent fennel loaf.
The remainder has been sitting in a small plastic bowl covered by a plastic shower cap in my fridge.You can see that I have added an assortment of grains to this starter. I can’t remember for sure but I think there is wheat germ and bran in there.
I then took out a lump of the starter to begin my next loaf. Most of the rest of the starter went back into the fridge after I added a bit more flour and water to the bowl.
I then got to work on the new loaf of bread. I added another tablespoon of brown sugar to starter in the bowl.
And then I added a tablespoon of salt.
I then added about a cup and a half or water.
Next in was about a cup of cornmeal.
A bread made with a commercial yeast will need two hours for the first rise. I have found that using the starter the bread does better with a long slow rise. I set up the dough after breakfast and didn’t form the dough until late in the afternoon.
I got a little fancy and rolled the dough into a rectangle, coated the surface with olive oil and then sprinkled Herbes Provencal on the dough and then rolled the bread up into a tight roll. I covered the dough with the towel and let it rise again for another couple of hours.
I baked it at 385 after coating the crust with oil.
This bread is crazy-good.
It’s now mostly gone. I had one slice. The bread eaters in this house went wild.
Making this bread takes a few sessions of about five minutes each over the course of the day. The loaf bakes for about 40 minutes. I suppose that I could pretend to my family that it is a huge undertaking to bake this bread or it’s many variants. There aren’t too many things in life that give so great a reward with so little effort.
Oh Thanks! I am like you about tweaking. So, I am already tweaking in my mind...having confirmed the main bits are what I thought they might be.
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Glad you got to see this Sandy- I am realizing more and more that bread-making allows for really wide parameters. This sour dough stuff is way easier than it seems to be from the fussy book directions that make it seem like taking on sour dough is something that must be done exactly one way because otherwise you will face horrible failure.You have to pay attention to the facts on the ground and adjust from there. Sort of the way i go through life.
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