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On Monday I took out the sourdough for its weekly feeding. My sourdough technique is slapdash (aren't you surprised?). My mother, Eileen, described her own rule for life as "by guess 'n' by golly", and I know I'm the same. Like it or not, we eventually, inevitably, turn into our mothers.
Anyway, rather than measure and niggle over my sourdough, I just feed it until I'm ready to use it. So I fed it (equal parts flour and water) all day Monday, not having the time to actually start the bread that day, until I had over six cups of sourdough starter ready to use. That's a lot.
I used two cups of it for some fantastic biscuits to go with Monday's dinner, but then I fed the starter twice more before bedtime, bringing the total amount back to well over six cups, which I left on the counter overnight to ferment.
Now, some people throw away excess sourdough starter. I beg your pardon? They do what? So no, that's not me. In this house we don't throw away good food (potential food, that is).
All day Tuesday my life revolved around bread. While I brewed our morning coffee I milled a quart of spelt flour in our grain grinder. After reading the paper, I started three kinds of dough: an ordinary white flour for French bread; my usual mixture of flours for whole-grain sourdough bread ("Scotch oats", millet meal, Red Fife wheat, spelt, and unbleached white flour); and finally, a white-flour dough enriched with eggs and butter.
By dinner Tuesday the top of our chest freezer (the only large horizontal space in the vicinity of the kitchen) contained three ficelles and two fatter French sticks; two large loaves of whole-grain sandwich bread; a dozen hamburger buns, a dozen sweet rolls (with fig and fennel jam), and a loaf of cheese and onion bread.
At bedtime I said to DinoVino, I think we should give some of this away; it's too much for us to eat and the freezer is full. And he said, No, we'll keep it. In the morning I pointed out again the fact that the freezer is packed with bread from previous weeks of sourdough play plus his own meat indulgences from the Virtual Farmers' Market. The. Freezer. Is. Packed.
So today I'll be delivering quarterings of sourdough loaves of one type or another to neighbours, adding a little happy gluten to their lives.
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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