I've tackled a lot of recipes over the years that required time and patience, but never before had I attempted a sourdough starter. I researched it briefly in the past once or twice when I was thinking about making sourdough bread bowls for chowder. However, I quickly changed my mind when I learned what needed to be done. Spending a week or two to develop a true sourdough starter, even for ME that was a little too much. So when my wife, Elisa, came to me and asked if I'd be interested in getting a sourdough starter from her friend, I excitedly said, "Sure!" It was pretty early on in the whole "Stay At Home" period so I had some extra time.
Fast forward a few weeks later and Elisa shared with me how she was reluctant to even ask me if I'd want the starter. "Because I know how you can get," she said. I'm sure my wife could explain it better, but lets just say that when it comes to new hobbies, the behavior I'm about to describe is pretty typical for me. I fully admit that I have an annoying tendency to turn something incredibly simple into something overwhelmingly complicated or extravagant. It's all my wife can do to balance being the strong, supportive woman who's all in and excited about my ideas... and the practical voice of reason who tries to reel me in without squashing my dreams. Poor thing.
I proceeded to spend the next several days and weeks, engulfing myself into learning some of the basics of sourdough. How to feed a starter, how often, how much, and how to make it stronger. I learned about mixing the dough by hand, and other crazy bread terms like, levain, autolyse, and lamination. I watched YouTube... so many, many, many YouTube videos.
Suddenly the basic ideas turned into some not so basic ideas. And those turned into, "Wow! I should buy some nice bread bags to stick the loaves in so we can give them away to friends and family". Then I needed to buy some additional bread books, including one for learning to mill my own flour. That turned into researching home mills (we had a difficult time finding flour, but scored some wheat berries). That turned into, "Babe, I need more dutch ovens so I can bake more loaves at a time". Quickly it turned into, I could really use a secondary brick oven that I can set up in the garage so I'm not killing everyone with the heat inside the house this summer. And somewhere in this chaos of ideas that I kept bringing up to my very scared wife, I began to think... hey, maybe I should start a blog.
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