Saturday, October 31, 2009

Sourdough breads

Today I made two sourdough breads from my BH&G binder: regular sourdough loaf and orange-cinnamon sourdough rolls.

One (sourdough loaf) requires lots and lots of rising time, and the other (the roll) requires none at all, but they both required one of the same ingredients: sourdough starter. Since my sourdough starter had spilled in the fridge (ugh) and was somewhat depleted, I decided to just use it all on these two recipes in one day.

Because the sourdough loaf required rising time, I started that dough first. It was a pretty typical bread dough with very normal ingredients, except for the sourdough starter, which required about a week or so of preparation. The yeast blob had to ferment over that period, which is basically where sourdough gets its flavor. (I didn't take any pictures of the dough rising, because it looked pretty much like any other rising dough ball.

By far, the more fun (and photogenic) bread was the orange-cinnamon sourdough bread. I should admit that I used a lot of substitutes for this bread, which I usually don't do, but I had already brought the sourdough starter to room temperature, and I couldn't go back for self-rising flour or oranges. So, I used grapefruit peel instead of orange peel, and I used a substitute recipe for self-rising flour.

The recipe was a bit odd - you mix the sourdough starter with some flour and stuff, and then it says to knead the dough 15 times. I thought that was kind of funny.

Then you roll it out and sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and citrus peel, then roll it up like a jelly roll!


This was super fun! I need to make more rolled doughs. The dough was super workable - I guess 15 kneads is just right.

Then you cut it up:


And put it on a dough sheet... Aren't they cute?


And then you have delicious sweet cinnamon rolls. It's kind of odd that it's made with sourdough starter, especially since the recipe allowed for no rising time, but I guess you don't really want these rising too much.

At this point, the oven was free for my sourdough loaves, which I had divided and allowed to rise some more as loaves. You add criss-cross marks to the top of the loaf, which you can't really see in this picture. But anyway, it was a nice little bread.


I wrapped up the two sourdough loaves, iced the rolls with powdered sugar icing, and brought the rolls and one loaf to a Halloween party we attended last night. We're going to do sandwiches with the sourdough today, which should be amazing.

As a post-script, I should add that my sourdough starter, which I named Brot, was not that hard to handle, but it was a little weird to be growing a yeast blob over the period of a week or two. I used it all up with the two sourdough recipes, so I don't have to keep feeding it. Hopefully Brot was delicious.

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