Tartine Sourdough Bread

After an intense interest to learn the art of baking artisan bread, I recently read Tartine Bread by Chad Robertson. His book is inspiring and his methods result in amazing bread.

This project has been ongoing for about 11 days. Making the starter from scratch with water and flour, feeding it daily, then yesterday creating leaven from it.

Mitzi has a lot of baking and bread making experience. She was super helpful to answer my questions and explain more about wheat and fermentation and interest things like that.

Today, the baking day, was started in the morning and working on it in small segments the entire day.

Creating the leaven from the starter. After sitting overnight this will become the 'yeast' for the bread loaves.

Time to create the dough. Take the leaven, add it to water, add flour, and hand-mix it all together. There are only three ingredients - flour, water, and salt!

After letting it bulk raise for about 5 hours, and mixing it up about every 30 minutes, it's time to shape the dough.

After letting it rise for about 30 minutes, the two loaves were put into baskets for the final rise.

Chad says that baking bread in an oven at home in a cast iron combo cooker gets identical results as a professional baking oven. So last night we headed over to Ace Hardware, on a recommendation from Maddy, and were surprised and delighted they had one in stock!

Here's the first reveal of the baking bread after the first 20 minutes baking. Looking good!

Back in the oven it goes, uncovered, for another 25 minutes. When it comes out we are delighted at the color, the texture, and the aroma. Beautiful!

Here goes the first cut. Nervous about what it will be inside.

Why was I worried?

We totally enjoy eating it! Maddy ate some too, but we didn't get a picture of it. All three of us fell in love with this bread.

Verdict? SUCCESS!

It was joyful to make this bread, share this bread, and eat this bread.