Or, you live, you learn.

For my graduation my aunt gave me a cookbook “Vegetarian Spain”. She wrote that she hoped I would like it despite being not a vegetarian, which is something that always puzzles me. While I’m happily omnivore (as is she), I’m not Jordan Peterson or his useless daughter and an exclusive carnivore. Actually, I more often cook vegetarian than not, so why should I be offended by a book about vegetarian cooking?

Anyway, what intrigued me was the idea of making my own sourdough.

I’ll post the recipe for the sourdough starter and not the elaborate kneading and resting instructions, you can surely find some on the net if you’re interested.

Starter:

Day 1:

Mix 150g whole wheat flour with 150 ml water in something higher than wide that holds at least 1l, cover with a clean dish towel, let rest in a warm place.

Day 2:

Add 75g durum wheat flour, 75 ml water, 1 teaspoon of sugar, cover again and let rest.

I didn’t have durum wheat flour, so ordinary flour worked as well.

Day 3:

Like day 2, minus the sugar. By now it should look like this and smell like it went wrong.

Day 4:

Carefully remove the brown water on top. Add 75 g flour.

Day 5:

You can use your starter now. You can also keep it in the fridge and add 75 g of flour and water every week.

I didn’t read the instructions carefully before and when I finally did so i noticed that making that bread would require the whole day and it was midday already, so I waited until the next day. According to the recipe the dough needed to be kneaded and folded and letting rest often and for a long time, so while it wasn’t that much work, it required several hours of being at home.

The recipe also asked for 600ml of water and that was way too much. Even after adding some more flour, my dough was too wet.

The finished loaf needed to rest for another 5-6 hours, and it simply ran, becoming very flat.

Another mistake I made was a good idea not thought completely through. I have this “pizza stone” which imitates a real stone oven, and I thought it would be a good idea to bake the bread on it. I still think it is, but I didn’t consider that the stone would need a much longer time to heat up than just the oven, so instead of adding direct heat from the bottom, it kept the heat away so the bread didn’t bake all the way through as you can see in the next picture. But you can also see how the sourdough worked and it was a damn delicious “just with butter” bread.