The Fantabulous Chronicles

I’ve seen the huge trend of making your own sourdough and all the different things you can make with it, but being the farthest thing from trendy, I failed to jump on the bandwagon. That was until a friend gifted us a sourdough starter just ready to burst out of its glass jar!

I love to bake and experiment in the kitchen, but with our youngest becoming more toddler and less baby, I also have a little less time to experiment without added… umm interruptions. So when Aaron brought the Thing home from work, I had mixed emotions. I like sourdough bread, but I can barely keep grass alive let alone something that takes a bit more finesse to maintain. Plus some of the recipes are intense. ( I’m looking at you 24 hour pancakes!) Nevertheless, the Thing was in our home and we needed to do something with it!

Week 1- Is it alive? The first week of the Thing’s life was one of fermentation. Whenever we opened it to feed, it reeked of alcohol. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be like that, so we dove in to what we were doing wrong. It was then that I discovered you had to take some out to feed each time to give it room to rise. We decided to try sourdough pancake batter for the 1st attempt at anything with the Thing in it. After a good overnight rest, Success! We ended up making waffles and they were delicious! Little did we know this was the start of some epic fails

Week 2- What is going on? The start of week 2 was coming off a high. We had just made our first edible item from the Thing and we were excited to see what else we could do. Think Isabella from Encanto when she discovers she can make more than pretty. We decided to go for sandwich bread…and it was the biggest fail I have personally had in a while. The Thing was nice and bubbly, I let the dough rise for like 30 hours in a nice warm spot only to find that the dough had not done anything. It actually looked worse 😛 With a little kneading and loaf forming, I hoped an extra rest session would work a miracle and at least change some . Nope nothing, but did i quit? Nope i baked that lump of dough anyway and it was awful! Think hard as a rock, yet chewy like dough in the center I didn’t even know textures that extreme could be possible in once slice of bread! With epic fail of the century under my belt, I decided the Thing needed a spa treatment in week 3 and i also should try researching to see if I was the problem for this debauchery disguised as bread.

Week 3- The Learning Curve. With chewy rock bread still sitting on the counter, I decided to discard a good portion of the Thing and see if a better schedule would boost its mood. I had also done some reading to see if maybe the equal ratio I was feeding it was correct or if something else was needed to fix the substance living in my kitchen. From what I could tell the Thing should look like a lovely yeasty mousse and have a sweet, pleasant aroma. My starter was not very bubbly, stank, and quite possibly wanted to turn into alcohol. I switched up the routine to 50g flour /40g water and crossed my fingers something would click. 3 days of feeding this ratio, I started to notice the smell was getting better. By day 5, I had achieved the mousse stage and was overjoyed to see the Thing start to bubble over! I wanted to redeem myself for the bread disaster of the previous attempt so went with the basic roundish sourdough bread recipe. This time it was a success! The only issue was this was the loaf that went missing after maybe enjoying 5 slices from it. ( note to self do not leave bread unattended with a wolf dog…she will steal said loaf and not leave a crumb of evidence behind!) With that shocking revelation we moved on to week 4.

Week 4- Dessert Stage. We have had the Thing for just over a month. I was still a little upset that the dog had inhaled the entire loaf of sourdough I had made after pampering the Thing endlessly for a week, and frankly didn’t have time to attempt another bread, that was when we discovered discard recipes! I didn’t know you could use the discard sourdough for so many things! I was able to make cookies AND banana bread and still keep the Thing nice and airy with minimal feeding. I think I will keep the Thing in a maintain schedule for a bit and see If I can correctly make sandwich bread next time. As much as I have loved experimenting with the Thing, I am looking forward to a break from its high maintenance 🙂

If you have any sourdough tips or tricks, please share!