After finishing Michael Pollan's most recent book Cooked (and possibly my favorite book ever!) I was inspired to be a bit more adventurous in my own home cooking. At the Lab it is easy to take advantage of all of the tools and ingredients we have available but when I leave there one day I will no longer have access those luxuries. So, I have decided to be more active in incorporating things such as bread baking, fermenting, and pickling into my own routine.
To begin, I started with cultivating a sourdough starter at home. Now many of you know this is not the fist time I have made a starter and it is definitely not the first time I have baked a loaf of bread. But after reading Pollan's section on bread, I began to really understand how the simple ingredients interact to create profound results. I followed his method for creating a starter and preparing the bread dough and was stunned with the results. My starter smells fresh, yeasty and slightly acidic and is happily bubbling away. My bread had a magnificent crumb and rose beautifully without the addition of any commercial yeast.
In the past of have been known to bake bread occationally, but it is now something I would like to do weekly. There is nothing better than a warm slice of fresh baked bread to start your day.
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