My sourdough experience, expanding the repertoire

In the summer I blogged about my experience bringing to life a natural yeast, sourdough starter. I made several very delicious loaves of sourdough, but started to wonder if I could really make a loaf every week without growing sick of it. My dedication to feeding my starter dwindled, going from a once a week thing, to a week and a half, to "crap, I need to feed my starter before it dies." Now, thanks to Clotilde, the writer of the blog Chocolate and Zucchini I have added two more sourdough recipes to my repertoire (it was from reading her blog that I first decided to try sourdough).

Two weeks ago she put up a recipe for sourdough bagels. The tasty looking pictures convinced me that I wanted to give it a try and so last week I made my first batch. As it turned out, they were an awful lot like Montreal bagels. If you've never had Montreal bagels, you're missing out. They're delicious, even though they don't have fancy flavours like blueberry or garlic and herb. Andrew and I happily munched on my bagels all weekend (breakfast and lunch). And so, when I had lots left over starter this weekend I decided to make them again.



After the success of the bagels, I looked through the Chocolate and Zucchini archives and discovered a recipe for sourdough English muffins. I whiped up a batch of those, with a mix of whole wheat and white flours. They were all right, but mostly just tasted like nice brown buns. Still with lots of extra starter I decided to try them again with just white flour and a sprinkle of corn meal. They turned out much closer to the English muffins you can buy from the store than my first batch, although still not quite as porous. I'm going to have to try them again and see if I can get the timing from after the starter is fed, to the making the dough right.




At least if the librarian/PhD thing doesn't work out, I can always fall back on being a baker. I can already make fabulous white and whole wheat bread/buns, sourdough bread, bagels and English muffins, and any kind of regular muffin, cake, pie or cheesecake you could ask for. I just need to add a few more types of bread, maybe ciabatta, pumpernickel or rye bread and find a good cinnamon bun recipe and I'll be in business.

Ciao,

Andrea