The Sourdough Saga Continues

I'm actually getting into a real routine with the sourdough bread.  Every other morning, while the kids are eating breakfast, I mix some kefir and oat and brown rice flour in with some of my starter--and a little flax meal.  I add one egg, a little baking powder, a little sugar, a little bit of salt (I know, measurements will come one day, really, I'm just not a very measury person and have been lucking out with not measuring).  I stopped adding a drizzle of olive oil because it's just so moist that I don't need to.  And I stopped adding xanthum gum because I forgot once and couldn't tell the difference.

Then I let it rise.  Some days I let it rise once, sometimes twice.  It depends when I want to bake it and whether I remembered to transfer it to the loaf pan or let it rise in the bowl (if it rose in the bowl it needs to rise again when I transfer it).  Today I let it rise twice and it took until about 4:00 until it was nice and high and ready to bake.  My dough is about doubling in size now when it rises, which is a huge improvement from my initial attempts.  It really improved exponentially when I added sugar to the starter and when I started covering the loaf pan with a lid while baking it at 450 degrees for the first half hour before baking it uncovered at 350 the second half hour. 

I'm about at the point where I think I'm going to stop buying any bread, for anyone (including the gluten eaters) because this tastes so good, is easier on digestion (the yeasts added to breads are much harder on the stomach than the natural yeasts "caught" in sourdough starters or kefir, and Micah complains of his stomach hurting if I give him too much wheat), is healthier (I'm grinding all the steel cut oats and sweet brown rice myself in the coffee grinder so it's all whole grain flour--plus I add flax meal), and does not require me to drive to the store.  Just trying to pitch the sourdough bread to any who might consider doing it, it's really good!  I can't imagine how good it would taste with wheat flour, yum!

Weird stuff on the counter (kefir and sourdough!) . . .

My shrouded jars are: 1) the gluten-free starter that is aspiring to be sourdough bread; and 2) kefir, a hippie-type food that basically contains the bacteria and yeasts in yogurt.  I find myself in a strange new (vaguely alarming) world of stirring and sniffing and waiting.  The kefir arrived in several baggies in the mail looking like little curds of cottage cheese in cream.  I put them in milk for 24 hours and--AMAZING!--I got a thin yogurt product by today.  It looks and tastes (and cooked, on our fish tonight) like a thin yogurt.  Yum.  So I read about it that you can thin it and use it like buttermilk in pancakes or strain it and make it into cheese or drink it plain OR you can use it as a booster for a sourdough starter. 

A sourdough starter, just for those who don't know, is a fermenting dough product that makes its own yeast through the fermenting process.  It's harder to do with gluten-free dough, so I read that using a few tablespoons of this yogurt-like kefir can help with the fermentation.  We shall see.  But it did make great yogurt.  And for those who are concerned that the milk product is on the counter, I did put the yogurt in the fridge.  What remains on the counter is my new batch.  When I go away for the weekend and can't swirl or sniff it I will put it all in the fridge.  I am hoping to get to make a decent sourdough loaf of bread before I go away this weekend. 

I read an article (Thank you, Aunt Nancy) about gluten and yeast creating an especially bad combo for our gut health, and how back in the day everyone made sourdough bread and it was so much better for you.  So, here I go, but it's even harder trying to make it gluten-free.  I also feel like adding the kefir stuff just puts me into a whole new camp of weird.  But I am loving it!

I will of course post any success or failure on my first sourdough loaf.  At least the starter doesn't stink, it smells sourdoughish, and it's been on my counter now for a good four days or so, which would have been long enough for it to go bad.  Hopefully this will be more successful than my attempts to make gluten-free beer bread with hard cider.