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Sunday, January 8, 2012

First blog!

Well I guess the best way to start something is to just do so here goes.  I hope this will be good practice for writing in general and really don't have much of a plan in terms of what I intend to write about other than our households efforts to be more self sufficient and learn to earn a living farming.  I'll try my best to keep my journaling tendencies to a minimum!
So my baby step for this year involves the resolution to home bake all my baked goods.  Thus far we have had a delicious quiche night with homemade crust and fresh eggs from our flock and breakfast muffins.  Today I made a white bread with rosemary and a sourdough starter!  I am particularly excited about delving into the world of sourdough, I read yesterday that some bakers have starts they've been maintaining for roughly a decade, amazing.  At any rate as soon as I figure out how to upload pictures I will add the ones I took during preperation.  I'm interested to try things like crackers and tortillas while hubby is particularly focused on trying english muffins.
Another related resolution I guess is to maintain a table at our local farmers market and offer at least fresh baked bread and mushrooms, maybe even empanadas and lemonade to draw the customers in a bit:)   

2 comments:

  1. English muffins have been on my "have to try" list for almost a year now and I still have not done them. I am also very interested in trying sourdough, where did you get your starter?
    By the way... welcome to the blogging world. I look forward to reading about your journey.

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  2. Hi there Seldom Seen Acres! Thanks for joining and commenting on my blog!!
    I am excited to try english muffins too and just today was perusing a recipe for them, it looks pretty easy, I mean no strange directions or ingredients, hopefully in the next couple weeks that will be the recipe. Until then I am pretty hooked on this sourdough experiment:)
    So as for that, I made my own starter. I did try and find some sort of Friendship bread group near me with no success. The recipe I used was from Bernard Clayton's Book of Breads and is the Yogurt Sourdough starter. I read plenty of recipes where you just set the bowl out to catch wild yeasts or use shredded potato but this yogurt one seemed the easiest and least messy for a beginner. The only ingredients were 1 cup skim or low fat milk, 3 tablespoons plain yogurt, and 1 cup bread or all-purpose flour. The milk is heated to 90-100 F and yogurt is then added. This mixture is put into a sterilized sealable glass jar and sits tightly covered in a warm place for 8-24 hrs or until it all looks like yogurt (if any pink coloring develops throw it away and start over). Once the mix is a chunky curd texture the one cup of flour is added and stirred until smooth. This is again covered and let stand for 2-5 days until it is bubbly and has a good sour smell. I'm glad I checked mine after 24 hrs as the lid was beginning to swell out from the bubbling and looked close to exploding. At this point I guess it can be used to cook with or stored in the refrigerator. I just made the 'sponge' day before yesterday for the actual loaf and it now has a good sourdoughy sort of smell and I plan to do the baking this evening. I replenished my starter after making the sponge by adding 1 cup milk and 1 cup flour and it went back into the fridge. I guess this has to be done about once a week even if you don't use it that often to keep the starter alive! How wonderful, there is an actual living science experiment in my adult fridge!
    It was definitely easier than I expected and you should try it too!! As soon as I figure out how to upload pictures to this thing I'll post the ones I took while making the starter, and hopefully of the finished loaf:)
    Thanks again for stopping by!

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