A Love for Sourdough
I’d never made much bread without using a bread machine until a year ago. I purchased a book, Bread Baking for Beginners by Bonnie O’Hara, and used my free time over the summer (when I’m not teaching) to work my way through the book. You master the basic techniques and advance up to sourdough. I wanted to make my own sourdough, which was the number one reason for attempting the complicated, technical endeavor of baking bread. I love that sourdough bread is easier to digest and really just uses three ingredients: flour, water, and salt. It is naturally leavened using a sourdough “starter” which grows natural, wild yeast from the air (yes, really!) from just flour and water left to sit in a jar. Sourdough has that good bacteria that aids in digestion, like a pro-biotic in many ways. And for me, it just tastes amazing! In the summertime when I have fresh tomatoes from my garden, a toasted sourdough baguette topped with bruschetta is really, really hard to beat.