Ammede Mol: My Bread Journey

Sourdough Bread - recipe from Artisan Sourdough Made Simple

It's been more than a year since we took bread off our grocery lists. Don't get me wrong, we love bread, now more than ever!

In the fall of 2017, my dear neighbor shared some of her bean soup and homemade sourdough bread. It was delicious, the bread being out of this world, unlike any that I had tasted before. She told me all about making it from scratch using a starter that she received as a part of friendship bread. And then she shared some of the starter with me. Unfortunately, I let the starter spoil, having no idea how to work with it.

Coincidently, another friend had started baking with a sourdough starter and raved about the benefits of slow fermentation, esp. the digestion of gluten. This piqued my interest and I came home with a stack of cook books from the local library. I was hooked!

Michael Pollan's series on Netflix - Cooked, episode 3 and 4 on Air and Earth was an eye-opener and cemented my desire to bake bread from scratch, the old fashioned way and remove active dry yeast from my pantry. During my travels that fall, I got a chance to read and listen to several books and podcasts on bread making.

One that stood out was the interview of Sarah Owens (ceramic artist, horticulturist / rosarian and baker) by Margaret Roach of A Way to Garden on her sourdough journey. I devoured her book Sourdough: Rustic Recipes for Fermented Breads, Sweets, Savories, and More and felt a connection with her lifestyle.

New Year's Resolution Jan 2018 - make my own starter. I bought "San Francisco Sourdough Starter" from Cultures For Health on Amazon and followed their instruction to rehydrate and build my starter. I had a decent levain in 2 weeks! I had embarked on my bread journey. My first sourdough bread was amazingly delicious and was over in 15 minutes. My family was hooked.

Left - Raisin Rye Bread, Right - Whole Wheat Sourdough

Back - Levain (aka Mother Starter) - named Bubbles

Recipe from Classic Sourdoughs

Over the past one year, my 'mother' starter has morphed into a wild yeast blend that gets fed a variety of flours from rye to rice, depending on what I am baking that week. I have experimented with different recipes and multiple styles of bread making, with many success and several failures as well. All of it is keeping me motivated to continue this journey.