If you cast your mind back a couple weeks to mid to late June you may remember we had a little bit of a heat wave.
And the combination of that little heat wave and the frenzy associated with the end of the school year made me forget to take care of my sourdough starter.
You know that line in the song, goes something like, “Someone left the cake out in the rain…” yeah, I left the sourdough out in the heat.
As a result, my starter went terribly bad. Not bad as in boozy smelling but bad as in, “get that stinking thing out of the house” bad. Bad. Really bad.
Fortunately I’m a generous person and I had given some starter to 3 friends. And when they saw me post on Facebook that my starter was now a non-starter (see what I did there!) they offered to give me a little scoop of my starter back to me. So I’m back in the sourdough business again.
Now that I have my sourdough starter bubbling away and being fed everyday again, I figured it was time to bake a loaf of bread. So I did.
I started this morning. Into my stainless steel mixing bowl I scooped up two cups of unbleached white flour, a half cup of sprouted spelt flour, and a half cup of dark rye flour.
I added a teaspoon and a half of pink Himalayan salt, a half teaspoon of quick rise yeast, and stirred it all together.
I then made a little well in the centre of the dry ingredients and added a cup and a half of water. Using a rubber scraper (a spatula to some) I carefully mixed the wet into the dry until I had a big sticky ball of dough.
And I let that big shaggy ball of dough sit in the bowl all day. When I got home late in the afternoon I added a tablespoon or more of sesame seeds and about the same amount of sunflower seeds.
I stirred/mixed those in and then left the dough for another hour.
After the dinner dishes had been cleared and washed, I cranked the oven up to 450° and put my cast-iron Dutch oven into the oven to pre-heat.
I rolled the dough out of the bowl onto a piece of parchment paper. I gave it a generous sprinkling of sesame seeds and then lowered it into the smoking hot cast-iron Dutch oven.
Into the oven for 30 minutes with the lid on and then 25 minutes with the lid off at 400°.
The results were spectacular.
I am so happy to be working with sourdough again!