aka my sourdough starter:
The story however started many years ago. Its seeds are to be found in my first days in Canada. I was used to the hearty pane casareccio in Italy. That is nowhere to be found here of course. And when does not have a lot of money and does not know the city, there aren't that many options. At that time, I used to go all the way from the Botanical Garden to Rachel and St Lawrence. There was a small portuguese bakery with a wood burning stove. Their loaves were 99c. I'd buy a few and freeze them.
Years passed. I started making my own bread. After all, it is only flour, water and yeast. I made my own concotions, without rhyme or reason. Basically, I replaced the white flour the recipe called for with whole wheat, added seeds and grains and voila. It was good, but nothing to write home about. I did this on and off for a while.
Fast forward to my trip to San Francisco almost 2 years ago. And the famous San Francisco sourdough. I came back with some dry starter. I frogot all about it until I cleaned up my pantry a couple of months ago. I decided the time has come to use it. I used my bread machine recipe for artisan bread. Oooouch. That was the worst bread ever made. No exageration. I made a bread pudding out of it. For the second attempt, I remembered I used to bake bread in the cast iron pot with the lid on. This is what I did and the reasult was a bit better. However, I could have successfully use the bread to knock off somebody. That's how hard it was.
By now, I had a huge bowl full of starter (the recipe to revice the dry grains called for three cups of water and three cups of flour) and no bread. Serious troubleshooting was needed.
The dough:
The bread:
And that was only the beggining! I also discoverd
The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. And
The Fresh Loaf. Since then, I tried the limpa bread, the cranberry-walnut bread, the stollen and the sicilian bred. Yummmm......
