My Sourdough Bread Adventure

Friday a week ago, I left off saying that I needed to go feed my sourdough starter and I did. I was preparing to make Glenda’s Honey Oat Sourdough Bread from her cookbook, Around the Family Table: Food, Fun, and Fellowship, which makes five loaves. Yes you read that right, FIVE loaves. However, I only decided to do this because I’d made her single loaf version from her website and it was gone very quickly and loved by the four of us.

Now, we generally go through 1-2 loaves of store-bought sourdough (THM plan approved) bread each week. Hubby takes a sandwich daily for his lunch and has a piece with his breakfast each morning. Son has at least one piece each morning and then the rest fluctuates. Consequently, I knew we needed at least 2 loaves a week and my options were either one loaf made using my KitchenAid mixer or two loaves by hand.

If I was going to have to do it by hand anyway, I might as well make the large batch and freeze three loaves until needed. That way I wouldn’t have to make bread every week. So five loaves it was. Trouble was, I didn’t have a bowl big enough to hold the amount of dough that I was going to end up with for five loaves of bread.

I pulled out my largest bowls and asked my family which they thought would work. Here were the bowls to choose from.I used to think my stainless steel bowl was big. :D but as you can see, it is the smallest one on the table by comparison. I was mixing the dough up in the orange-red bowl and it was already 2/3 – 3/4 full, so I knew neither of those two were going to be big enough for it all to rise in.

The red plastic bowl is one I bought for artisan bread in 5 minutes to sit in the refrigerator, several years ago, but even it didn’t seem like it’d be large enough. And although the punch bowl has a nice large top, its optimum capacity would probably be lacking.

I was beginning to think I might need to divide the dough into a couple different bowls because the cake saver lid just didn’t seem to be the right thing to use and I doubted that the lovely wooden Honduras salad bowl would work.

Then on top of all of this, I needed to cover the bowl with greased plastic wrap which meant to me that it wouldn’t be able to rise over the bowl’s rim. =)) The family voted that the cake saver lid was the best option in spite of the place where the handle is connected on the inside. I took some trusty packing tape and covered it up.

I’ve had some trouble with some pain in my right wrist in the last year or so and was concerned about the stirring of that much dough and the kneading of the dough for nearly ten minutes. Family to the rescue! They were actually quite proactive during the whole process.

Michael helped combine the ingredients with my dough whisk, which I also got for that artisan bread I mentioned earlier. Then after I’d kneaded the dough for about five minutes, I showed Sean how to do it and he spelled me for a bit. I finished it off the last minute. Then oiled the cake saver lid and put the dough inside, turning it over to get a bit of oil on the top and bottom of the dough (exactly for what reason, I do not know ;) ). Then I sprayed the bottom of the cake saver with oil and attached it.

This is what it looked like five hours later. :)

Look at those gorgeous bubbles. When I ordered my cookbook I requested the mature starter from Glenda that she so graciously offers.

It didn’t even touch the “lid”. So I guess it was a perfect fit. :)

I got out all my loaf pans. I have two of the stainless steel ones that Jane recommended, a very old dark and small one, and two glass ones of different sizes.

I stood there looking at it for several minutes trying to figure out how to get it portioned into five loaves. I finally dumped it out onto a mat and used my handy dandy dough knife. Worked like a charm!

Here they are ready to rise for about an hour or so before baking.

Unfortunately I let them rise too long and didn’t do the slits across the tops of the loaves quite right but they are still very good. Oh, and I also forgot to take more pictures.

Here is what is left some 5 days later . . .

It is a great recipe and I was even successful with it. I’ll definitely do it again. I just hope it isn’t next week. ;)

I’m sorry this bread story got so long. I promise to share a recipe with you next week. Well, technically I did share a recipe with you today because I gave you the link to Glenda’s single loaf recipe on her site. It’s what I started with before moving on to the five loaf recipe.

Have you made sourdough from scratch?

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

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