I love sourdough bread. I also love baking. So, it's a no-brainer, now that I can work from home and know that the work for sourdough is ten minutes here and five minutes there, that I want to try. What's not so much of a no-brainer is getting it right!
I had a go at making a sourdough starter about this time last year, but life got busy, I couldn't work from home at that point and after a while I chucked it out, assuming it had died. I've since learned, that it's quite possible it hadn't died and I may have been able to revive it, but I didn't know that at the time.
A week or so back, I decided to have another try and found myself a likely looking sourdough starter recipe. The recipe seemed to work; the starter certainly had plenty of bubbles on the surface on day 3. So, on day 6, when the recipe suggested that the starter should be ready to bake with, I found a sourdough bread recipe and got cracking.
The starter seemed active, with lots of bubbles and it certainly rose well at first. But when I knocked the dough back it didn't seem to rise any further. The resulting bread was dense. So dense it was vaguely reminiscent of Dwarf Bread, in fact.
I've read stuff here and there since then and at the moment my starter is out on the kitchen counter waiting for its second feed of the day (in an hour or two). I can't bake tomorrow, but I'm thinking I'll start off a batch just before I go to bed tomorrow night and let it rise in the fridge overnight (which, from what I've read, should mean it has a better sour flavour). We'll see....!
