Sourdough

Now we have made sourdough bread, bread-sticks, and biscuits. A rather mild sourdough, not very sour, and slow growing. The bread I had to let rise four hours each time. Another thing to think about early in the day. Easier than the pulled pork though since it could be left alone for four hours, shaped, left alone, and cooked. None of this brine for a little while, cook for a little while, take the foil off, cook a little longer. The nice thing about bread is it takes so little hands on time. Half an hour spread out through the day. My uncle has also given us another start, affectionately known as 'Stinky Feet'. Mom says it smells like rotten milk, I think it has a rather fruity smell. Haven't made anything with that one yet. It seems to be more active so the rise time shouldn't be as long. I wonder how much anyone has analyzed the products of the yeast and bacteria in sourdough. Run it through a GC-MS or something, after mushing it up and all. What exactly is giving it all these flavors and what are those bacteria anyway? One paper said Lactobacillus, but I am sure there are many others. Do we really know what we are eating anyway?

As far as the Cooks Illustrated goes Mom made the 'fixed' baked apples and this was the greatest deviation from the recipe yet. Most we had before was substituting broth for wine in the stew. We didn't have apple cider, so used (pine)apple juice. Not another apple for the chopped to go in the middle so it was dried apricots. This was my least favorite recipe. Way too sweet, except for the tasteless apple. It probably has more to do with the apple used and the changes to the recipe than a bad recipe. Might have to try it again with better apples and the appropriate ingredients.