Baking

It's been so interesting to see posts around making (and keeping sourdough starter).

I happened to have some fresh rye flour in my pantry, ground from rye berries (uh, I'm a food geek, and had bought them last fall for some unknown reason, probably thinking I was going to bake German Vollkornbrot again.  So I ground the berries late last fall, before leaving for Quebec for our snowy winter sojourn.   As I was preparing to hunker down, they were niggling at me -- hey, you need to use the rye flour!

So, my day two starter is looking good. The King Arthur recipe that I'm following calls for rye flour to start (who actually really has that on hand?)  A baker on my local list-serv was looking for some recently.  I offered mine up, but she'd found some already.

I've  kept starter going for years, in the past,, as I've baked all our bread for decades.

But having some relatively fresh rye flour on hand, as well as whole wheat flour, I thought, well, why not rekindle this (my garden blogging friends and my dad's wife were interested in sourdough starter, suddenly and amazingly, I thought) so I have time to experiment again.

We're under Stay Home, Stay Safe orders in my county in NC.  So I have time.

It's looking good. And the "discard" sourdough from this morning turned into sourdough pizza crusts for this evening's dinner, including an extra base for later.

I'm following King Arthur Flour's method, but there are lots of different versions out there, including from them, using different variations of rye, whole wheat, or white flour, even with a bit of commercial yeast to jump start things; I just happened to have the rye flour on hand, which is hard to find in many areas, even in normal times, so I'm using what must be their "classic" recipe.  When I was replicating the delicious whole-grain breads from Germany, I used a rye starter that was easy to do (again having to grind rye berries to get the rye flour, remarkably).

I also have an almost full jar of yeast, bought a couple of weeks ago, along with another 5 lbs of whole wheat flour. So hopefully we'll be set for a few weeks to a month. Even baking all our own bread (there's a loaf in the freezer along with whole-grain muffins);  surely we'll have enough?

I'm grateful that I'm a baker, cook, and gardener.

But I'll be missing fresh ingredients soon, too, unless I'm willing to dash into the grocery.  We have plenty of frozen vegetables, chicken and fish on hand, as well as a ridiculous amount of canned and dried food, too, so I'll be resisting the urge to go to the grocery.