More sourdough experiments

Anyone who has been reading here for a while would have noticed that I have a sourdough starter called Gertrude who is now an international traveller :-) The CEO can't eat the thick crust on the sourdough I make so I was interested to see a Soft Sourdough Loaf come up in my Pinterest feed a while ago and pinned it for future reference. I had a look at Home Joys blog and found some other loaves there that looked easy enough for me to make and I wondered how the braided Soft Rye Sourdough Bread  I saw on that page was made.

I showed it to Mrs.Meagre, my sourdough mentor and baker of incredible bread, and she decided to make it too but as a marbled loaf instead. Well, of course I knew nothing about marbled bread, so asked Mr.Google but took one look at the dough I had made using Home Joys recipe and decided that it was too soft for me to knead as obviously I didn't get it to the right consistency in the beginning and tossed that idea. However, after the dough had risen I thought I would experiment and plopped the two different doughs on top of each other and pressed them together, did a little bit of kneading and plopped them into two bread tins to wait and see what happened....as you do! 

By this stage it was about 7pm and I had the menfolk wanting to get into the kitchen (not to wash up by the way) so I got a bit stressed and quickly lined the bread tins with baking paper and got a bit carried away with that obviously due to hurrying and put the dough into the oven to do the second rise as per Chris' instructions in her tutorial.

Well one of the loaves had a section that rose up like a balloon and I just knew that if I tried to slash the top it would collapse...as it did...and the Lame just dragged the dough around and wouldn't slash so that part didn't work out but into the oven it went anyway....

....and this was the result. A tad disappointing but I left it to cool and then wrapped it up overnight.

I sliced it this morning and was quite chuffed at the appearance despite the dodgy soft crust on top which tended to break off in parts when being cut. It was a bit off putting eating this bread with cheese and tomato on it for lunch though as my brain was telling me it was should have been sweet but it wasn't. I used cacao instead of the cocoa in the recipe as that is what I had in the pantry in case you are wondering what was used to colour the bread. If you would like to see a 'proper' marbled bread then check out Mrs.Meagre's loaf as she does a marvellous job with her breadmaking.  As I have mentioned previously she has been running a sourdough challenge on The Home Maker's Forum and you can read the challenge posts on her blog if you would like to learn how to make a sourdough starter etc.

I am not sure if I mentioned that I tried to make the Rustic Sourdough she had made as part of the challenge but had a bit of trouble once I fed my starter with some rye flour and it took forever to be ready to add the rest of the ingredients but in the end I added them anyway and left the dough to rise overnight. I didn't think it would work out so quickly made one of my tried and tested loaves using white and rye flour but something happened to that one too so it wasn't a good day for making sourdough. LOL!

In the end I experimented again and put the rustic one into a casserole dish to see if it was possible to cook sourdough in one....probably not as I found out...and I ended up with one very pale loaf and another one that looked quite grotesque after the slashing was done. It just kept getting funnier and funnier.

However, despite the appearance of both they ended up tasting quite nice and were okay inside as far as I was concerned.

The rustic one had a really nice taste and I will make it again but might wait till it is warmer as I don't think it liked the cold weather we had the day I made it.

So the experiments go on and I still want to make up some of the loaves in the book I borrowed from the library. I would buy it if it wasn't so expensive but I have bought too many books recently so will control the impulse. 

Has anyone started making sourdough lately? It isn't as easy to get the dough to  rise in the colder weather but I usually put the container into a Woolies insulated bag with a hot water bottle. However, as I always bake two loaves at the same time I might buy one of the styrofoam boxes with a lid from one of our local fruit shops that sells them for about $3 and see if I can fit two bowls in that during winter.

There's nothing like a bit of experimenting to see what works for you is there?