For the Love of Sourdough

A couple of months ago, I had a boring, repetitive job to do, and while I did it, I ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos. Around the same time, I became interested in a couple of Facebook ads for sourdough-making groups, and I fell down the rabbit hole of watching other people’s videos about their sourdough-making processes.

Before too long, I was itching to get my starter out of the fridge, and I’ve been baking with it ever since!

I’ve dabbled in sourdough on and off for close to 10 years now. For the longest time, the only thing I consistently used it for was sourdough pancakes; the family liked them, and they were easy and pretty much failproof. Bread? Now that’s a different beast!

My first introduction to sourdough was through Traditional Cooking School. We bought (and still have) their sourdough cookbook, and I’ve had fun experimenting with many of their recipes.

Unfortunately, the bread recipes they had in the book didn’t work for me. They were sour, didn’t hold together, and while the occasional artisan-type loaf was nice, I never enjoyed the fact that it looked like a frisbee or a brick when it came out of the oven.

So for many years, aside from making pancakes, I mostly ignored my sourdough starter—and at times, didn’t even have a starter!

Occasionally, I’d get the sourdough bug. Surely there’s a way to do it, I’d think, and try again—only to meet with more failure. It must not be possible with our flour, I thought—New Zealand flour did seem to act differently from what Mom had in the US, after all!

So until around the beginning of April, my sourdough starter was mostly a forgotten fridge ornament.

Then came this boring job, and the advertisements from Facebook that grabbed my attention. Before I knew it, I was watching 2-3 hours of video each day from many, many different sourdough enthusiasts from around the world. They said encouraging things like,

Just start!”

Pick a recipe, and stick with it until it works for you.”

It doesn’t have to be perfect to be a win!”

I came across an interview with Mike from Rosehill Sourdough, and loved the way he made sourdough feel accessible. Doable. No longer mysterious, but fun and (dare I say it?) yummy. (I’ve since watched some of his YouTube videos multiple times, trying out different recipes.)

Then I came across Rebekah from That Sourdough Gal, and again her tips and tricks and “here’s how it works for me”s made me feel like yes, I can do this, too.

Sometimes, I just watched videos of people with micro-bakeries, pumping out loaf after beautiful loaf of the most delicious-looking bread. I wished we could have smell-o-vision (h/t the Mr. Lemoncello books). Many of them explained the process as they went; the ones that stick out in my mind are Urban Treats from Australia and Simpel Sourdough from Denmark.

Oh, and there’s The Bread Code from Germany—not a micro-bakery, but he does sourdough demonstrations for the more nerdy ones of us, and I love his sense of humor!

So…armed with all these great bakers’ words echoing in my head, and knowing that if I had any trouble or needed questions answered, I could turn to the (very active) Facebook communities I found, I pulled my jar of sourdough out of the fridge and started.

I’ve since made two successful batches of sandwich bread, inspired by Christine’s Notebook’s video, but modified to match what I knew worked for our yeast sandwich breads. To my delight, they turned out beautifully! Not quite as fluffy as my normal yeast bread, but not so sour that it shouted “I’m sourdough”, and boy, were they ever tasty!

And, inspired by other bakers, I started experimenting with other sourdough products. Fudgy brownies (we couldn’t believe they were sourdough, since they didn’t taste like it at all—they disappeared!), pizza dough (I got mixed reviews on that one, mostly because I used some too-sour starter for it), foccacia bread, egg noodles, vanilla cake, waffles, pie crust…a good mix of normal bread-type recipes, and surprisingly delicious desserts.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’ve been baking a lot more desserts the past couple of months. Which probably isn’t a good thing, but I’ve had such fun experimenting that I’ve kinda ignored it. 😉

The biggest surprise in this journey so far is that sourdough doesn’t necessarily have to be sour to work—almost everything I listed above tasted just like you’d expect a “normal” recipe to taste, except better, somehow. Something like what you’d experience with a stew put together and simmered for a couple of hours, versus a stew made from homemade stock that was simmered for several days and then turned into a meal.

Not everything turns out perfectly every time, of course. I just baked two loaves of bread last night (one of the loaves is pictured above) that were half the size of some loaves I made a couple of weeks ago. My process for these loaves was slightly different than the other two trials I’ve made, and obviously, I did something wrong—or my starter wasn’t in a happy place (which is also quite possible).

Trial and error, and trial and error, and sometimes, trial and success! I’m planning on continuing to experiment, learn, and hopefully grow in this method of bread-making, taking notes in my trusty Dough Diary as I go, and perhaps one day I’ll find myself in a rhythm that works well.

What are you experimenting with in the kitchen right now?