A Good Start

So Hunny and I were invited to eat dinner at family's house from the branch after church one day. While conversing, it came up that the husband was interested in and made his own cheese and bread. I have recently been on a huge cooking high and was thrilled to hear this. While discussing this interesting hobby, he offered us some of his sourdough starter. I am about jumping out of my skin in pure excitement at this point.

We were instructed to feed it once a week, flour and water, after dividing it in half. What do you do with the half that's not fed? BAKE IT!! Instead of yeast, use the starter. This was all very new to me and I was super excited to experiment. I feel like yeast is very temperamental and easy to mess up on. Our poor started looked pitiful. It had not been in the fridge for a while after we got it allowing it to rise a bit but when we got home it was placed in the fridge.

A week later when it was feeding time, it looked so very flat. But we attempted to use it anyway. Mind you, this is late Saturday night and the recipe we use required us to continue in the morning before church. Hunny and I threw the ingredients together and Hunny kneaded it. Why would I need a KitchenAid when I have my wonderful husband?

With bread prepped and set aside to rise we decided to start cinnamon rolls for breakfast, being in the bread making mood and a little more comfortable working with yeasts and dough. It was a box that had it's own yeast but it was old and we were afraid it was dead. Fortunately, Hunny had previously bought me my own yeast for my experimenting. Though it was a wee bit more then called for, my research told me that it wouldn't hurt rather, just make it rise a bit faster. Perfect! I would have to say cinnamon rolls were more fun to make. Again, when the hubby is the kitchenaid you can see why. :)

With both batches set to rise over night, or chill in the fridge till ready, we headed to bed. Having to allow time to re-knead, rise, and bake, we set our alarm for 6am. Well, instead of 6, we were alarmed at 8am when we woke. We promptly flew out of bed and Hunny went to work on the breads while I got ready. This is a time when I am glad guys don't take much to get ready. We only had time to bake the cinnamon rolls, mostly because that was too much to pass up and it was to be our breakfast. Unsupervised in order to get ready, they were slightly burnt. But other then that they turned out wonderfully! I would still say what a success! They were perfect! It was somewhat disappointing that they turned out that wonderful but were burned. But I must redeem ourselves by saying we are using a Korean oven. It also acts as a microwave and grill and something else but I don't read Korean. :P

We were able to hitch a ride from some buddies to church and made it in time. We gave them some not so burnt cinnamon rolls as payment and they loved them so it is not just me being biased about our baking skills.

After church and home again we went back to the not yet forgotten bread. The instructions said to allow to rise and when it didn't we... ok I, began to worry. But always calm and cool Hunny plopped it in the loaf pan and turned on the 'ub-un' to bake. We learned with the cinnamon rolls to watch and when the top began to get toasted to quickly, I had read to place tin foil on it. We did, but this made it harder to watch. When we thought it time we pulled it out. I smelled slightly burned smell, and sure enough, the bottom? weird? was burned. It wasn't fluffy but it's not a rock. It's actually really good. I'm proud of how well it turned out considering. We have been using it with everything. I began looking up online if I could make it wheat and I will be buying wheat flour here shortly. ;) I can't wait till next week to have another go. Hopefully we will be making our own bread on a regular basis after a while.