A bit more still…..

Well, the title is completely unimaginative…is that even a word….but I thought and thought and thought and really couldn’t come up with anything terribly witty and I gave up because it was a waste of time to stall and I have very limited time at this point….you know with the baby and kids and all…

So, I made a mistake on Monday night and read my recipe wrong…or rather I didn’t read it, and thought that I needed a TON of starter, and doubled my starter and ended up with 2 swimming pools of starter and now I either throw it out – which seems like such a waste to me – or use it. I’ve opted to use it, but again with the limited time thing…that makes things interesting.

Now, the deal with the sourdough starter…it is really simple to make, but when you don’t know what you are doing, it can be a bit stressful, and I haven’t really found any place that shows you pictures of what your starter should look like along the way or when it’s ready to use. AND….I found nothing that talked about making a sourdough starter with Kamut or Spelt flour….which is what I wanted to use because those are our grain of choice around here.

Basically you mix water and flour and let it sit around, and it collects bacteria from the air, and ferments and becomes all bubbly and then rises. You have to “feed” it every 12 hours so that it stays alive…..that can get annoying. Then you have to store it somewhere. I keep mine in the oven with the pilot light on because it likes to be a bit warm. I read somewhere that it’s a bit like having a pet because you have to take care of it, and really, it’s true. I’m a bit sick of “taking care of it”, but I like the fact that I can make stuff that’s healthy for my family and that costs us considerably less than storebought stuff.

So far, I’ve made bread, twice; Pizza Shells, 3 times, and crackers, 3 or 4 times. There is definately a learning curve, and each time I make something – it gets better and better, so we are definately on an upward trend and that’s a good thing.

The first time I made the bread – I have no pictures – I made the fast bread. It required the most amount of starter and the least amount of time to rise. It made two little loaves that tasted pretty good. They had that nice sourdough taste, but they were SOOOOO dense. Read that to say thick and heavy…like a brick. They still tasted pretty good, and we are pretty used to thick heavy bread so it was okay.

Here are some of the loaves from the second time around (This was the medium time frame bread that took 7 hours to rise as opposed to 2 hoursfor the quick bread and 12 hours for the longest rising bread)….I know that it doesn’t look like it, but I promise you that these were ginormous compared to the first loaves.

The recipe that I have says to slash the tops with a rasor blade, and I reluctantly did – I was worried about them falling, and..well…. they never did rise any more, so I might not try it the next time and I’ll just see if they rise any more than this current batch. I would like it to rise some more…..to be a little lighter and bigger.

See, here is a shot of those “slashes of death”….

So, here are the loaves, cut into slices. We cut the loaves up and then wrapped them and put them in the freezer. They have no preservatives, and so unless we plan to plow through all 6 loaves in the next few days, then I have to freeze some of them.

Of course, I had a helper in all of this, and I must throw in a gratuitous shot of my baby, right???

Look at those little lips… Isn’t he so darling? I could just eat HIM up, forget about the bread.

So, last night after all the little monsters darlings had been sent to bed, I decided that I would whip up some Pizza Shells because from start to finish it takes about 45 minutes, and I had that much time before I was headed off to bed, and for crying out loud, I gotta use up some of the “throw away” starter that I got sitting in a giant popcorn bowl in my oven.

Here is the stack of pizza shells after the first “pre-bake”.

There are only 7 in this stack although I made 8, Jon and I ate one last night, and boy was it yummy. These shells puffed up a bit bigger than the last batch I made. I rolled the last ones VERY thin, and it was more like making pizza on big round crackers.

Here you can see the size of them…they are a bit bigger than my hand, so the perfect size for a personal pizza.

And this is how thick, or thin – should I say, the suckers are.

If you are interested in making your own bread from just flour and water, I am more than happy to just give you some of my starter, but I’d suggest that you google it, and read up on the effort required and what all is involved because it’s way different than just throwin some ingredients into a bowl and making bread and then putting it all away and enjoying. It’s easy, but a lot more effort. Oh, and I have a spelt flour starter…if that works for you…at least this one is.

Also, I want to THANK YOU for your comments, although I feel absolutely terrible, because as much as I LOVE to hear from the people reading, I totally didn’t mean that you who do read are not important or that I don’t appreciate you. I was commenting to myself – in a very poor way, but I did have the luxury of knowing what I was thinking inside my head – about how brutal and sporadic my posting has been. I’m trying to have grace with myself because I know that I am in a different phase of life than I was a year ago and 6 months before that and the years before that, but I “like” to write things out, and to keep a record, and to be able to “craft” a post so that it’s funny or makes you think or something, and yet recently – it’s basically just been throwing words on paper, and not in a good way, and not very often, and that bothers me, and I know that I’ve lost some readers over the past year, and I blame that on my crappy and sporadic posting.

THANK YOU, seriously THANKS for your comments, but if I made you feel bad, then I APOLOGIZE, sincerely. I really do. Are we good? I hope so. Hugs, Kisses, loves all around.

Alright now, I’ve typed those last two paragrapghs with one hand because the baby was screaming himself silly – which for any of you who know him, that means he fussed two times – and so I nursed him to put him out of his misery and now he is almost sleeping and I gotta go and get some stuff done. Gotta make the most of my hands free time.