Honey wheat sourdough Bread

Making bread and conserving ingredients I have been making a few crazy experiments as to what I can get away with while making bread during our Stay-at home Order. 

I have a bucket of wheat flour that is most likely outdated...It smells fine but is very wheaty tasting when cooked. I am determined to use it up and not waste it. That being said I am mixing it with all purpose flour at a rate of 1/3 of the flour that the recipe calls for. We have found we can live with that!

One of the other things is that if I mix it like my regular bread it ends up DRY!

So I'm pushing the limits with water and making this bread dough  on the runny side to fix the dryness issue.

As you can see it's almost a batter like consistency

I cover with cling wrap that has been brushed with a little olive oil to keep from sticking and let it rest

  when it's nice and bubbly from the active sourdough...I toss in the oven and bake 20 minutes.

 It's ugly and it's not going to win me any baking championships anytime soon, but we are using up that old wheat and it's actually good.

 Anyone else doing crazy experimentations in the kitchen while on stay at home order? Leave me a comment and let me know ;-)

Saving Sourdough Starter

This Winter I had a sudden urge to make sourdough bread. I have made homemade bread for the past 25 years off and on for my family but had only tried sourdough once when my boys were still small. 

It didn't go well, I killed the start and created  some sort of weird fuzzy science project.I put out a call to my local Face Book friends to see if anyone had a sourdough start. My sweet friend Marrina had one to share and we had a great visit the day I went over to pick it up. 

I have been happily making sourdough bread for the past month my family really enjoys it and so far I've made many loaves of Artisan Bread, Foccacia Bread, and Pancakes, cookies and was even able to share a start with someone else.

 Since we have been enjoying this start so much I want to make an insurance policy that I wont kill it.

That lead me to find a way to dry the start that can be revived later. There are many reasons one would want to do this...In case you take a little break, go on vacation or you kill your mother start, just to name a few ;-)

The method I found at King Arther Flour was to place a cup of the starter thinly on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and let air dry until completely dry. It will become brittle and can be broken into pieces. This process took a couple of days and I also used a small fan to help with the drying.

I wanted to make the pieces smaller and easier to re hydrate when the time comes. 

I used my little food chopper and found it just wasn't fine enough for what I wanted.

I pulled out the coffee grinder and pulverized the pieces into powder. The coffee bean grinder was the ticket here!

 This made the hard chips into the perfect powder form.

 I spread the powder back out on the parchment with the fan on low for a couple more hours to ensure dryness.

 And now I have a back up sourdough starter!

To re-hydrate I will add the powder with luke-warm water and add unbleached flour and restart the process of feeding my sourdough start. For now my mother start is happily growing along!