Sourdough

 
Our friends Denis and Laura are bread-baking experts of sort and regularly whip up delicious-sounding loaves of all sorts. When Laura was over from Canberra last month, she brought me some of their sourdough mother (the starter used to make sourdough), and I have been diligently feeding it ever since, waiting for a chance to try my hand at one of Denis and Laura's sourdough recipes (yes, you have to feed it, and it's called mother!). Yesterday I finally got my chance and baked this rustic loaf! I used the much easier no-knead recipe, which had you bake the bread in a lidded oven dish. It all seemed very strange to me, having never made bread before in my life, so I was over the moon when I opened the lid to reveal something that looked like....bread! And it smelt like bread, too! And when we ate it a couple of hours later at our lovely Anzac Day picnic with Eko and Rick (and bubs), it tasted like bread, which is to say completely delicious! I couldn't have been prouder :)

I really love this idea of having an ongoing 'starter' that you use to create something delicious, like the Chinese and Vietnamese tradition of a master stock. And I also love the idea of sharing it around, so I gave a container of Denis and Laura's sourdough mother to Eko and Rick yesterday...and soon we will all be baking sister breads!