I love to bake – cookies, cakes, slices, bread, you name it, I’ll attempt to make it. I am always up for trying something new; in fact, you will rarely find that I make the same treat twice. About a year ago I tried my hand at making sourdough bread. I made my own natural yeast starter, fed it and looked after it, and eventually once it had grown, attempted to make bread. My very first loaf was a complete failure. It was dense, barely rose and did not look like sourdough in the slightest. My attempts improved very minimally over the following weeks, but I certainly never achieved anything close to the perfect sourdough loaves that you find at the farmers market or artesian bakeries with that classic open crumb. And as much as I desperately wanted to create beautiful ‘social-media worthy’ bread, and was aware of the many intricacies in the art of creating sourdough, the problem was not with my starter, my kneading technique or my oven – it was with my patience. I simply didn’t have the patience to mix, let my dough rise for some 20 hours, only to knead it once more, and let it rise for another 12 hours before baking it. I wanted my bread to be made quickly, to eat it that day (so much so I actually tried adding instant yeast to the mix …) So needless to say I quickly resorted to returning to normal instant-yeast bread recipes that involved much less waiting-time.
Miss Linguine 