Monday, June 6, 2011

Gluten-Free Sourdough, Take Two

My bubbling and active sourdough starter.
So I'm back to making the sourdough bread again.  I gave it up a year ago because I couldn't handle the sourdough smell while I was pregnant.  I had to throw away the starter.

I've had mixed results.  The starter is good, active and not too sour.  And it was easy to come up with that again: one part flour, one part water, a little sugar, a little kefir.  But since I stopped for a year and didn't write down any measurements for making the actual bread when I was in the swing of making it . . . I am finding it very difficult to get going again.

I baked five different days so far.  Day one was moderately successful, a little flat but tasty.  Days two and three weren't cooked all the way through.  Day four was amazing.  Day five I left the house while it was cooking and didn't get to turn the heat down partway through, not the best.  So what I need to do this time is actually measure, really, and record it in the blog so that I can replicate it if I take another year long hiatus.  I also realized that any readers who actually wanted to try to make the bread on their own probably found it really annoying.  My apologies if anyone else found it as annoying as I did the past two weeks to try to figure out what Val meant by "a little bit" or "almost kneadable."  That is the most difficult part of all of this: how close to "kneadable" to get the bread.  If I was using wheat, kneadable would be the way to go.  But typically gluten-free gets dry and choky unless you keep the dough pretty moist.  Interestingly, though, I keep letting the bread be too wet.

I will press on, and I will share measurements when I have them.

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