On Mar 7, 2020 I started my effort to bake sourdough ordering from King Arthur Baking. I love to cook and have not been a big baker, and decided to give it a try. I was lucky and started this effort before covid got so many others into baking. I had flour, active yeast, and my new sourdough. It has now been over 7 months and I now bake sourdough once every two days. Luckily I got a new gravel ebike that I will write about and ride over a 100 miles a week now and can eat my sourdough without worrying about weight gain.

below is my first batch of baguettes that tasted good, but they looked horrible.

Now my sourdough boules look like this.

I have tried different recipes. Different flours. Watched many videos. And got a much better feeling for when the dough is right. Nice thing this got me to experiment with my pizza dough recipes and they got better too.

I knead the dough which some consider a waste of time. I use the kneading time as part of meditation exercise and I figure out many different tough issues. If my mind is not in the right state I cannot see if the dough is right. Seeing things for how they are is one of the hardest things

Some ask if I use my pizza over to bake the sourdough. Nope. I use a regular oven and Lodge Dutch oven which makes it so I can easily bake my sourdough when I travel by car and can bring all my supplies. At some point I’ll work on baking sourdough in my pizza oven, but that is much more time consuming. After months of practice I’ve worked on how I bake as if it a classic process engineering problem with my own time and motion studies. Now I can make one batch which is for two loaves. Bake one. Have other for slow fermentation in the fridge. Two days later bake that one. Now I am only making dough twice a week and having fresh sourdough every other day.

After 7 months of baking sourdough I have a regular meditation feedback system that helps me work on tough issues and lets me share bread that is so much better than what I have bought in bakeries or stores.