I made bread with the bread baby! It worked! Yippee, yee-haw, and whoo-hoo!

The kids and I tore into one of the loaves while it was still hot from the oven. We spread the warm, crusty pieces with lots of butter and tore off huge mouthfuls.

Since it was getting close to noon, I just cut up apples and sliced off some chunks of cheese and called it lunch. Supper was sandwiches. I toasted thick slices of the bread and spread one slice with pesto and one slice with mayonnaise and then put oven-roasted tomatoes and slices of Provolone cheese in between the two.

Like I said, we’re going to be eating a lot of bread from now on.

Country White
Adapted from Breads from the La Brea Bakery by Nancy Silverton, and briefly summarized.

I do not normally measure my ingredients in pounds and ounces, but I discovered how easy it is to put my Kitchen Aid mixing bowl on the scale, zero it, add the starter, zero it, and so forth. There’s hardly any mess, and it’s very exact.

Note the nice hole structure—it looks just like the holes in the bubbly starter. Nifty, huh?

1 1/3 cups (12 ounces) white starter
7 cups (2 pounds and 2 ounces) white bread flour
2 1/4 cups (1 pound and 2 ounces) tepid water
½ cup raw wheat germ
4 ½ teaspoons sea salt
a little oil

Day One
In the morning I mixed up my ingredients (the process includes kneading it in the mixer for 5 minutes, letting it rest for 20, and then adding the salt and kneading it for another 5 minutes, and so on—little details that I don’t want to bore you with).

I put the dough in a lightly greased plastic bowl and let it rise for several hours. Then I dumped it out on a lightly floured counter and cut it into two pieces.

I lightly kneaded it to get all the air bubbles out,

and there were a lot—do you see them?

I left it to rest on the counter for 20 minutes. Then I shaped the dough into two boules.

I lined two glass bowls with cheese cloths (you’re supposed to use bread baskets, but I don’t have any), sprinkled some flour over the cloths and set the boules in, smooth side down.

I covered them with a shower cap/plastic wrap and let them proof on the counter for one hour before slipping them into the fridge.

Day Two
I took the dough out of the fridge first thing in the morning (actually, Mr. Handsome did that for me because The Baby Nickel woke up at some obscene hour, like 4:30, and so as Mr. Handsome left the room to go fetch the non-sleeping twit, I croaked to him to please take the bread out of the fridge, which he kindly did) and took off the shower cap/plastic wrap,

and let them sit on the counter till they were about 62 degrees.

I put my big pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven and preheated the oven to 450 degrees. I gently turned one of the loaves out on to my floured cutting board,

docked the top with a knife (it’s a backwards C cut for the Country White) (a razor blade works way better than a knife, but this being the first time baking sourdough in a year or two I wasn’t fully prepared), and slipped the loaf off the board and onto the hot pizza stone in the oven. (There are no pictures of that process because I had to work quickly.)

I spritzed the oven thoroughly with water right before putting the loaf in the oven, right after I put it in, 2 ½ minutes later, and again 2 ½ minutes later. Then I set the timer for 20 minutes and did not open the oven during that time. When the timer went off, I rotated the loaf 180 degrees and continued baking it for another 10 minutes. Then it was done and I baked the next loaf the same way.

Some of you have probably figured out that there is a problem with starter. A quantity problem, as in too much. I’m feeding this baby three times a day, each time doubling the amount of starter that is already in the jar. So, for example, if I have one cup of starter, I add ½ cup of water and ½ cup of flour. Then I have two cups of starter, so at lunch time I add one cup of water and one cup of flour. Then I have four cups of starter. See? There’s potential for some serious issues.

I only have three ways to use up all that starter: bake with it, give it away, throw it out. If I used all that starter in baking I would never leave the kitchen, and so far no one has come knocking at my door, empty jar in hand. That means that I mostly just throw it out. It’s careless and wasteful, I know, but I do have to take care of My Sanity.

One thing I have done to help cut down on the waste is to make only the minimum amount of starter that I need in order to keep it my baby healthy; I’m now only reserving ½ cup of starter every morning. That means I can keep the baby in a half-gallon jar now, instead of a gallon jar, and I have just enough for one (maybe two, depending) recipe of bread each day, if I were to want to bake each day. Which I don’t. But, in any case, I’m not tossing such copious amounts of flour and water onto the compost pile.

Here is my baby in it’s half-gallon jar. It’s ready for it’s lunch. Notice how bubbly and alive it is.

Here it is after I’ve added water and flour. The bubbles have been smoothed out, but by suppertime it will be just as bubbly as it was before lunch.

And so it goes.

Warning: If you have a weak constitution and can’t stand the sight of blood, do not look at the pictures in this post. I don’t think they’re very bad, but I know I’m not everybody and I do want to be sensitive to my dear readers.

We live in the country, on five acres, so naturally my kids get their fair share of bumps and bruises. I do try my best to prevent them from getting injured. I mean, I have rules that are supposed to keep them (and our possessions) safe. For example:

*do not go in the barn,
*do not go out of the gate on to the road,
*do not go over/through the fences into the neighboring fields,
*do not go in the chicken coop,
*do not climb up on the grape arbor,
*do not go in the tool shed and open the trap door and climb down into the well,
*do not go in the basement,
*do not play around the clotheslines,
*and so on.

Our house is even strategically placed (not by our doing) in such a way that it sits up at the front of the property right by the road and from the kitchen windows (which are our doing—I envisioned and demanded them and Mr. Handsome installed them) I can see out over the whole five acres.

But the knocks still happen.

The other day The Baby Nickel took a fall.

He was climbing the ladder that led to Yo-Yo’s fort when the ladder tipped over and fell. (Thankfully, he did not hit the edge of the doghouse roof—he has already been injured on that thing.) The kids say he landed head first. On a rock. Ouch.

I washed him up and tied a diaper around his head as a makeshift do-rag.

He didn’t want to move around much (he probably had a whopper of a headache) and kept slumping over in the swivel chair, trying to fall asleep.

It was the perfect opportunity to take some close-up shots of him, something I don’t normally get to do because he’s always in motion.

If you’re looking for a moral to this tale, it would be this: If you ever want to get a non-blurry photo of your highly active kid, just bonk the kid on the head. JUST KIDDING! (I can’t believe I just said that. I’m kidding, really.)

Isn’t he a perfect picture of pathetic peacefulness?

He has fully recuperated now though he still winces when I wash his hair. I haven’t seen him on the ladder since then. Maybe that hard rock knocked a little sense, or at least caution, into him.