Let There Be Bread

I followed through!  I said I was going to make a new sourdough starter and bake some San Francisco Sourdough bread and I DID IT!  This is the bread you have to wait for….2-5 days for the starter to decide whether it will grow or die.  Ingredients of only starter, flour, water, salt.  Loooong waits for resting and proofing.  Patience, indeed.  There will little moments of joy along the way.  People coming into the house saying “do I smell bread?”  Peeking in the oven, under the little dish towel blanket to see bubbling goo (that’s a good thing).  Serious upper body workout to knead the dough.

And here it is…..my first loaf of traditional San Francisco Sour Dough Bread!

We had every intention of taking a picture before cutting into the loaf….don’t really know what happened there.

But, let’s start from the beginning…..

I’m not a purist.  Yes, I used some yeast to jump start the job.  Throwing out a failed started can put me in a funk for at least a week and I wanted to avoid that.

I did learn (from extensive Googlie research) that my prior failures were probably due to using chlorinated water.  So, pure water from the filter at exactly the correct temperature was in order

All mixed up and ready to go – popped into the oven at the Proofing setting.