Sourdough Rebels

I am blaming Sarah for our sourdough shenanigan adventures. You will find I blame Sarah for a lot of things that we do or products that we try. We both bring adventure in a different way to our friendship. I am more of the sporty active adventurer and she is more of the self care guru adventurer 😂I always joke that she will look forever young and I will be the old lady with wrinkly skin. I digress…Back to sourdough and the adventure that started 4 years ago. Does 2020 ring a bell? I don’t necessarily say that COVID sparked our particular interest in sourdough, but nonetheless, we began in 2020. Sarah told me one day that she ordered a sourdough starter from Amazon of all places, and she was going to give it a go. My first reaction to things that are not inherently my idea is skepticism, so I told her to get back with me. My memory of sourdough was from growing up when my mom would have a starter on occasion. However, this was the sweet kind of sourdough where you fed the starter sugar along with the flour. The bread definitely had notes of sweetness and oftentimes I remember it being crumbly.  Sourdough in my mind was supposed to be more like the bread you would get at a bakery with a thick crust, chewy insides perforated with holes, and a hint of sour. 

A few days after she got her starter, Sarah shared a loaf of bread with me and I was utterly amazed at how delicious this “sour” bread really was. I asked a million questions about feeding the starter with only flour and water and simply loved the simplicity of the dough that included flour, starter, salt and water.  She shared some starter with me and so it began. 

Here is our honest opinion of our trials and tribulations with sourdough…the blog posts about sourdough can be overwhelming and cause us more stress than help often. I do have to read through them to gain an understanding of how to go about whatever recipe that I am attempting to make, however, ultimately sourdough is not that difficult and we want to tell you that anyone can do it and share the simple niceties of having homemade bread smelling up your home weekly. 

For starters, no pun intended, you need a starter. As I mentioned earlier, in the beginning we found a starter to order from Amazon, and yes it worked beautifully. But, I promise you that someone somewhere has a starter you can snatch at any time. All you need is about one quarter cup to get started as well as a wide mouth mason jar of some kind. I would recommend a pint size. The interweb says you are to measure ingredients in grams with a kitchen scale every time you feed or make bread. That is too much for us and we don’t have the brain space to crunch numbers on a daily basis for bread. So we just roll with measuring cups and what we see in the consistency of the starter and dough. You may ask how we know what the “right” consistency is? I can tell you that has come with 4 years of experience. We both have made many mistakes or “learning moments”. Our failures include too much water in the starter, forgetting to feed the starter for a day or two, putting the starter in the refrigerator and leaving it too long, meaning longer than a month, in which it definitely will die. We have not discarded enough starter in the jar and it grew too much so it became less active. With all of these learning moments, I can tell you we have not killed too many starters other than the time I (Kimberly) left mine in the refrigerator at least a couple of months. I wanted to try and see if it would come alive again, so I removed the black ring off the top and fed it a couple of days before making bread. Instead of bread it made a brick! Haha! So, there is your warning not to leave your starter in the refrigerator more than a couple of weeks without feeding it. The nice thing about making sourdough is the ability to keep it going as much as you want or as little as you want. Currently I keep my starter on the counter and discard a little each day when I feed it because we are making bread or dinner rolls at least two times a week. When I don’t feel the need to have so much bread, I keep it in the refrigerator and feed it weekly and then return it to the safe space just to keep it alive and use it when I want. 

Our favorite sourdough recipe is one that makes a nice loaf we use for breakfast toast, lunch sandwiches, or sliced for dinner. The pretty round loaves are pleasing to the eye, but take more time and not as convenient for the daily use of bread. We make a nice round loaf on occasion for a special dinner or when we are feeling froggy. I don’t even read the loaf recipe anymore and know it by heart as well as loosely measure. But I can tell you it works every time. I have a vivid memory of literally mixing the bread and never touching it again until I plopped it in the loaf pan and wondering why it just didn’t seem quite right. I still had good bread, but I missed the part of folding the dough twice after the initial mixing which made a world of difference with the texture of the dough. Nothing hard, but just a rookie mistake of not having the energy to read through a full blog post 😉 We will work on a simple sourdough guide next week for all of you who have a spark of interest. I recently helped a neighbor friend get started and she is doing great! 

The process of bread making touches all your senses in so many ways that make it a satisfying accomplishment. The eyes see beautiful bread out of the oven, smell is invoked during the baking process with warm aromas filling the house, folding the soft dough touches the hands speaking to the brain that creating something beautiful in your own kitchen is a work of art yet feeds the family. Anything good comes from a process right? I don’t consider Sarah and I experts by any means, but we are definitely seasoned in our own ways. We are titling this blog post “Sourdough Rebels” because we are rebels when it comes to following recipes exactly. We are busy moms and we have learned that you have to adapt to certain situations and learn along the way. We hope this helps you find joy in anything that you do and that you are a great mom doing a great job with your family. If you decide to take on the art of sourdough, I promise that you will succeed but you definitely could have several giggles along the way. 

XO,

Sarah and Kimberly