Home Made Bread!

We've baked our first loaves of sour dough bread.

It took almost 24 hours. We had to seperate a baby sponge from the mother sponge, feed it and wait 6-8 hours while it soured up. Then combine the ingredients and knead them into a ball which rests for 6-8 hours. After that we put it in the bread tins and let it proof for 4-5 hours. Finally comes the cooking and the eating. That all adds up to 21 hours.

We seperated the baby sponge at about midday, made the ball at about 7, put it in the ceramic loaf "tins" at midnight and started cooking at 5am. We wouldn't have gotten up so early had the pager not gone off. I'm secondary on-call this week and something at work needed attention. We couldn't get back to sleep, so we cooked the bread.

The dough was rising and falling all night. It rose to fill the bowl whilst it rested, then it shrunk again when I put it in the tins, then it rose and filled those containers. The first loaf burnt a bit on top, and we didn't cook the second loaf for quite long enough, but they are both delicious. It's a shame we don't eat much bread :)

We still have the mother sponge, and will continue to make bread on the weekends. We'll see if we can make the schedule fit a normal day.