Adventuuures Iiiin Sourdoooough

My sourdough starter has been bubbling happily along for about a month now. I tried... um... breeding(?) my own sourdough starter from scratch once quite a few years ago and met a dismal failure. However, the instructions on Artistta made it really clear and simple for me. Hopefully they'll work for you, if you want to give it a try, too! 

After the first week, when it stopped smelling awful and started smelling how you would expect a blob of yeasty bread gloop to smell, I began saving the extra starter. To keep your starter active, you have to feed it with fresh flour and water every day to keep your hungry yeastie beasties alive. Each time it is fed, it bubbles up and nearly doubles in size, so you end up with way more than what can fit in your jar very quickly. You can put this extra starter in a container in your fridge and use that in many recipes. 

So far I've found sourdough recipes that fit into two categories:

• the quick, foamy baking soda variety, and 
• the long-rising, sour yeast variety

Here are the recipes that I've tried: 

Sourdough Naan

The naan is up at the top. This was also my first time making an Afghan recipe. It's called Kabuli Palau and has my stamp of approval. :)

This was my first try at naan, period. They were not very pretty, and they were a little more doughy than the ones I have tried in restaurants. I think this had more to do with my lack of experience than the recipe. A little butter, garlic, and parsley helped! Each one I made looked a little better than the last, so I'm excited to keep practicing this recipe until I feel competent with it. 

Quick Whole Grain Sourdough Waffles 

These use a lot of leftover starter up. Instead of letting the starter do its thing overnight, you add some baking soda to make the dough foam up and get fluffy. I was impressed with how light and airy these waffles were considering they were made completely from whole wheat flour and had flax added to them. It makes a lot of waffles. If you can't eat them all, you can freeze them or put them in the fridge and pop them in the toaster to reheat. They're really yummy with fruit, yogurt, and jam! 

Classic (Long) Sourdough Waffles

 

With apple butter and yogurt

 

 These take more planning, but you get more of the tangy sourdough flavor than with the quicker waffles. My sourdough starter is made with wheat flour, but I used all purpose for all of the added flour in the recipe. This recipe also calls for buttermilk, which I almost never have, because I don't go through it quickly enough. If you find yourself in the same boat, you can make a substitute by adding about a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar to a cup of milk and letting it sit for five minutes before adding it to your recipe. These were tasty, but they didn't crisp up very well. I think I'll try them one more time and leave them in the waffle iron for longer. 

Impossible Pie

 

This is supposed to be similar to biscuit mix impossible pie, which requires you to dump savory ingredients in a dish, dump the biscuit mix on top, and stick it in the oven (in technical terms). Again, it uses baking soda, so you can whip it up in a moment's notice (Well, ok, more like 40 minutes' notice). For some reason, the biscuit part of mine turned really dark in the oven. Not a pretty dark, either. Almost gray or green. I'm thinking it may have been a reaction with the cast iron pan I cooked it in. But we still ate it and it tasted good! I'll try it in a glass pan next time and see if that fixes the weird cosmetic issue. 

And finally…. 

Sourdough Bread!

 

 

Haha, yep! My first attempt turned out kinda sad. I can see why many of the recipes online call for added yeast, to help guarantee the long wait for this bread is warranted. But I wanted to try the real deal with just the yeast I had been cultivating in my starter. I think it would have worked, too, but I made the mistake of trying to do it all in one day. It rose really well and developed a great sourness! But by the time I got the loaves formed and was waiting on their final rise, I was soooo tired. I called it quits and went to bed. In the morning, the outside of the dough had dried out, but it still looked worth baking. It's edible, but, as you can see, it's very flat. It's also very sour. I'm looking forward to giving this recipe another try with that first rise starting the night before bake day!

Your turn! What are your favorite sourdough recipes? Have any recipes you would like to see me try out next?