In a post which I wrote days before Easter, I promised to make videos about making sourdough bread. Today we begin with making your own sourdough starter. Bellow the video is the recipe I follow with some notes that did not make it into the video. Enjoy!
Step 1. Mix 3 ½ tbs. whole wheat flour with ¼ cup unsweetened pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for 48 hours at room temperature. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. (“Unsweetened” in this case simply means no extra sugar added).
Step 2. Add to the above 2 tbs. whole wheat flour and 2 tbs. pineapple juice. Cover and set aside for a day or two. Stir vigorously 2-3x/day. You should see some activity of fermentation within 48 hours. If you don’t, you may want to toss this and start over (or go buy some!)
Step 3. Add to the above 5 ¼ tbs. whole wheat flour and 3 tbs. purified water. Cover and set aside for 24 hours.
Step 4. Add ½ cup whole wheat flour and 1/4 to 1/3 cup purified water. You should have a very healthy sourdough starter by now.
While the above recipe, as I mentioned in the video, asks to wait 48 hours between Step 1 and Step 2, the last time I made the starter there was plenty of “activity” to proceed after 24 hours. Stay tuned for the next video tomorrow.
If you ever baked a loaf of bread before, you can easily get hooked on everything related to sourdough. I got hooked a while back, and tried to document some of my early failed attempts to make sour dough starter.
Now I generally bake at least one loaf of bread each week, some times more. I have even made an attempt use the sourdough to make a pecan nut-roll (pictured bellow), made sourdough focaccia bread, sourdough pancakes and some other yummy stuff. Unless there is no other way around the recipe, I tend to stay away from commercial yeast.
Sourdough Nut Roll
My wife’s recent video inspired me to make a few videos as well. To start off it my first videos will be related to sourdough bread making.
I plan to being those videos tomorrow. To star off, I will show you how can you make your own sourdough starter. I will follow what I call a “bullet proof sourdough starter recipe“, which I learned form the good folks at Breadtopia.
If you would like to follow along, you will need the following:
Whole wheat flour. I recommend the King Arthur flour, but any whole wheat flour will do.
No sugar or unsweetened added pine-apple juice. Look for it in the whole food section of your store. If you can’t find it, just pick can or two of diced pine-apple. Look for the kind that says “no sugar added” or “unsweetened”.
A plastic container (about 1/2 to 1 quart)
Even if you never backed a loaf of bread before, you might enjoy doing this with me. While sourdough bread tastes great, there is also another aspect that I truly enjoy when working with sourdough- and that is working with nature itself, where nature is actually the true artist.
Enough said! Get your ingredients together and come back tomorrow!
While I was baking my pineapple upside down cake the other day, I actually made a double batch of yellow cake batter. I wanted to experiment with a new idea for the cupcakes- bake them in ice cream cones.
It was fun and they turned out so much better than I expected!
If you decide to make them this way, make sure to not overfill the ice cream cones with the batter. Fill the out no more than 2/3 of the way:
You can see in the picture bellow when they bake they will rise considerably:
You can use the icing to finish them. Don’t they look just like ice cream???
The thing that surprised me the most was the fact that the ice cream cones held up their color. I thought for sure they will come out much darker, and was afraid they might actually burn.
Next time you are tying to do something new or different with your cupcakes, try baking them in ice cream cones. They’ve got approval from my little nephew!
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