It's Bread Day, So Let's Talk Sourdough.

I make bread from my sourdough starter once a week, usually on Mondays.  So many people act like making bread is really hard or really complicated, but it isn't that complicated, and honestly, with a mixer, it isn't too hard for me with my disability on most days.  If it is too difficult that particular day, I wait until the next day in hopes my pain will be better.  I use a couple of hacks to make it easier for me with my fibromyalgia, though, which I'm sharing today.

First of all, I stopped trying to make the perfect loaf of bread every time.  Seriously.  My bread is different every week, either due to using different flours or due to changes in humidity or how long I let it rise or whatever.  Since I eyeball so much of this process and wing it, the bread varies a bit.  My starter is a wild yeast starter, so that population changes and fluctuates a bit, too.  It's okay.  The kids still eat it, my husband always loves it, and if you put enough peanut butter on it, it's all good.  The bread is fairly forgiving of my pain and disability, and it really doesn't need a ton of manhandling or figuring.

I keep my starter in a quart jar with a plastic top in the fridge most of the time.  The fridge doesn't kill the yeast, just slows it way down, which is really handy on conserving spoons (energy in chronic illness talk).  I feed it once a week, leave it out long enough for it to settle and get bubbly, and then I put it in the fridge until the next time I need it.

When I feed my starter, I pour it all out of the jar into my Kitchenaid stand mixer bowl.  Now, I know most people say never to use a metal bowl for sourdough, but that's because so many bowls used in home kitchens are aluminum and not stainless steel.  Or, at least they used to be.  Stainless steel does not react with the sourdough, is used in commercial bakeries, and is just fine for using at home.  Anyway, I pour it all in, using a favorite silicone scraper to get as much out as possible, and then I use warm water in the sink to rinse out the jar really well and set it out upside down to drain.

When it comes to feeding or baking with sourdough, I have found that adding the liquids first works best.  So, when I feed the starter, I add about half a cup of water or so first, mix that in really well so it's uniform with no lumps, and then I add in about a cup of flour.  Once that's all mixed in (using my stand mixer on bad days, by hand if I'm doing well enough), I use my Ball jar funnel and fill the starter jar to about the 1.5 cup line or so.  That usually leaves me with the amount of starter I need for baking bread.

Quick note on flours: if you're going to get into bread making at all, you'll want a few flours on hand.  First, if you want to do a whole wheat bread much of the time, you'll need a good whole wheat flour.  I prefer stoneground myself, but honestly, I get whatever's on sale, usually King Arthur.  Now, there is some evidence to say that we all should only be using organic flour, and if you can afford it, that's your best option.  Our Costco sells a great one about once a year for a few months, a great organic all-purpose flour that makes for a decent bread flour, but really, nothing beats a good bread flour for helping to develop the crumb just right.  If your starter seems not to be as bubbly as it should when it's to room temperature and has been sitting out for awhile, then it needs a hit of rye flour.  Rye flour has the highest amount of wild yeasts in it, so it gives your starter a boost of more yeasts and different ones.  So, I usually keep on hand bread flour, at least one kind of whole wheat flour, organic AP flour, a multigrain flour (if I can find it--often makes a dense, good bread), and some rye flour just in case I need it.  There are so many good flours out there these days, and if you can find good prices or have a good bulk buying option, have fun finding what works for you and your family.

After I put the 1.5 cups of starter back in the jar, I am left with enough to start bread.  If I have too much, I put a half cup or so in another bowl or jar to use later for English muffins or pancakes or whatever.  When I have the energy or the need within a couple of days, I use that up.  If I have the energy on bread day, I get that other recipe's poolish going, too.

For my bread, I use this recipe and double it.  It has never steered me wrong.  I get out my kitchen scale, measure the water into the bowl with the leftover just-fed starter, mix that up thoroughly, then dump the flours on top and lastly the salt.  Then, I put it on my mixer for several minutes until it looks about right, and then I put a damp towel on top of the bowl and stick it in my oven with the light on for several hours.

Now, sourdough is a great kind of bread for us disabled types.  There's a lot of rest time in between each step, and the most is with the first rise.  If I'm struggling by the end of all this, I stick the bowl into the fridge to wait until the next day.  If not, I know I'm not baking bread until later that evening, and I usually wait for my second wind around 8 or 9 at night for the rest.  It's pretty forgiving stuff.

I stopped doing anything beyond shaping it and letting it rest before baking ages ago.  Doing a full second rise and then a third rise just seemed too much, and while it helped with flavor, it didn't do enough to warrant all that extra time and mess.  So, I just do a long first rise, dump it on the counter with some flour, knead lightly a few times, form a ball, and stick it in my big glass bowl I've already oiled.  Then, if I don't have it in me to bake it right then, I stick that back in the fridge until the next day.  If I do, then I put my cast iron pot (with the lid) into the oven, crank it up to 450, and get it good and hot for half an hour.  I dump in the dough, use a knife to slash it a bit, pop the lid on, and bake for 30 minutes.  Then, I take the lid off and reduce the heat to 425 and bake for another 15 minutes.  That's it.  I pull it out, put it on a rack to cool, and the family has bread for a few more days.

What's nice is that my husband and my son are both okay with helping, so if I crash after putting it in the oven, they can help with the rest.  I really need to teach my kids how to do this over the summer this year so they can take over entirely if needed.

While I don't have a problem with gluten like so many with fibromyalgia do, I have found that my bread is easier on my GI system.  It tends to be the only bread I eat.  With my soybean allergy, I can't eat most commercial breads anyway.  With this bread recipe, I don't have to think about sugars or oils, just flours, salt, and filtered water.  It is easier to make and easier on my system.  Now that it's a part of my weekly routine, I know I almost always have a loaf of bread I can eat sitting on the bread board in my kitchen.  Unless my son eats half a loaf after swim practice. 

Baby Steps Toward Sustainability

It's been a rough couple of weeks around here.  Massive weather swings and strong storms have taken me out much of the time with pain, and all three kids have been sick but all with different things.  This has definitely messed up my plans for spring so far, that's for sure. 

Spring has been a bit slow to come this year, and we're all getting grumpy about it.  Then again, I remind myself of how things were when I was a kid, and March definitely was not a true spring month.  More like a late, grumpy winter spitting snow and ice at random.  Same with April.

Instead of working in the yard (which has only finally lost the last bit of snow yesterday), I've turned my attention to indoor issues with sustainability as well as more detailed garden planning.  One of the things that has been bothering me is the paper trash.

Recently, my husband and I decided to add in paper trash to the composter (our large, used turning bin that really does a nice job).  I'd been reading up on Pinterest on what can go into a composter from household trash, and it's a lot. Way more than we'd been saving.  So, I put bags in the bathroom, bedrooms, and next to the kitchen trash with signs saying what to put in there.  While getting the kids to put the paper trash in the compost bags is hit or miss, Robert and I have been getting much better at it.  In doing so, he and I have been floored at just how much of our trash is compostable and how much waste we have been producing.  And here we'd been happy that we'd cut down on our waste...  Seriously, it's rather something to go through a trash bag and pull out everything that you can put in the composter instead.  For the bathroom trash, it's about half.  Half!  It's amazing how much kleenex we've gone through this winter alone.

So, after seeing how many cotton rounds I was going through, I ran across a pattern for something similar on Pinterest.  I made one, and in a quick trial for my homemade toner (witch hazel tincture using lemon balm and some other herbs with a dash of tea tree oil), I was really impressed with how well it worked. 

So, this weekend when the pain was bad but okay enough for fairly mindless work, I made ten of these to use instead of cotton rounds.  I also used this from Pinterest as a base idea to make my own makeup remover solution from my lemon balm witch hazel tincture and got reusable microfiber rounds from Dollar Tree.

A trial of that tonight showed it to be quite the success!  Moreover, the round washed right out in the sink with a bit of soap, so that's drying in the used wipes bin.

With my son having a GI virus this weekend, the homemade antiseptic solution and reusable wipes (like these only blue, and I cut them down into fourths) have been getting quite the workout.  I have found that the solution really does dry out my hands quite a bit, so next time, I'm using gloves.  Still, it's nice knowing that the alcohol in the solution kills whatever has gotten him sick so the rest of us don't get it.

Eventually, I will need to replace the microfiber and synthetic cloths with all cotton in order to eliminate the microfiber waste in the water and all, but this is a first step, a baby step.  Next, I need to make more handkerchiefs for everyone, though the used kleenexes will definitely be put to use in the composter.

While the paper waste is something the worms like, it isn't good for us to use so much of it.  Paper towels, kleenex, paper napkins, cotton rounds, and q-tips alone filled two paper grocery bags for the composter today, and that's just in the last few weeks.  So much waste, and this is an area we can cut down in.  Now if I can just get the gardens planned out and start working in those to get them ready for planting...