Pandemic sourdough

The title of this post should maybe just be "Sourdough" because the story of the sourdough started before the pandemic. 

Sometime last year, I was asked to be the 'scientist' in a panel discussion with an invited author, Sandor Katze, who writes about food fermentation. I had never heard of him and had almost zero knowledge about fermentation. But I agreed, and had a blast (of course). I ended up going to all the events related to his visit, including an AMAZING dinner designed by an artist that uses fermented food as a medium for their work (fermentation and feminism). It was fascinating.

Anyways, that brings me to sourdough. One of the events was a partnership with the public library, which was doing a book club on a book, "Sourdough" at the time. So I read the book. It was kind of blah, but I got really into the idea of making sourdough. And my husband read the much more interesting fermentation book by Sandor Katz and got into making fermented peppers. So we tried each. The peppers worked great (except for a few that failed). The sourdough, not so much.

The first starter we forgot about and it dried out.

The second starter we overwatered and it molded.

The third one died with no explanation. I think it knew about all the others and was protesting on principal.

The fourth one worked, which happened during the pandemic. After about a week and a half, we were sure we weren't going to kill it and we started our sourdough. We followed a recipe with great detailed explanations from Tartan, a bakery in San Franscisco (we bought their book). We let the bread rise outside in the morning, when it was about 80F, and when it got up past 90F in the afternoon we moved it to an uninsulated part of our house that was about 80F (the rest of our house is at 73F with air conditioning, which we've found isn't quite warm enough). It rose really well. The studly hubby did a great job working the dough because he has learned how to work dough from all the pizza he's made over the years. Then we baked it and boy! it was so great.