Marie Cookpad

  I think you would have to be living under a rock in recent weeks not to see all of the highly decorated focaccia loaves on the internet.  Very pretty to look at for sure. I have only just dipped my toes into the world of Sourdough.  I recently mastered making the starter successfully along with a few bakes with the started and the discard. You can see my tutorial on how to make a Sourdough Starter here .      I am ever so pleased as I have finally mastered this skill!  I have also managed to store it and bring it back to life again with great success, and if anything it is even better now than the original one!  Apparently you can keep these things going for years and years.  I watched a program on the television about San Francisco, the birthplace of sourdough and in the original factory they were still using the starter that they had been using since the 1800's!!  Now to me, that's amazing! All of those highly decorated focaccia are...

  I'm still using my sourdough starter, feeding it and discarding the excess on a daily basis.  I have managed to dry some of the discard starter as shards which I have stored in the dark recesses of my kitchen cupboard ready to reconstitute and I have made sourdough crumbs as well, again waiting in a jar in my cupboard ready to be reconstituted at a future date.  We will see how that goes! You can see my complete tutorial on how to create a Sour Dough starter here .  Why not learn something new!   At this time when there is such a shortage of flour and new flour is hard to come by I cannot bring myself to actually discard any of the starter, not into the bin, or the compost pile, or down the drain.   It seems like such a waste, so I have been religiously researching ways that I can use it besides pancakes and brownies.   I was looking on Pinterest for Biscuits that I could make.  Many of them looking spurious at best, like they had stolen s...

One thing I have been longing to master for quite a while now is to make a working Sour Dough Starter that I can use to make my own bread with.  We are experiencing a shortage of yeast at the moment (and flour and sugar for that matter) so creating something like a sour dough starter is a skill we can all use.  I had tried once before with NO success.  I thought I would try again and I watched quite a few videos on You Tube and finally felt secure enough that I thought I could master it. (Fingers crossed)  What I am sharing with you today is the result of about two weeks trial and error and finally SUCCESS!   I think the real key to my success this time was using filtered water. The time before I had used tap water. I had no idea that the chlorine etc. in tap water would have a hug impact on the success of your starter.  This was something that I learned this time and it was a real boon to my success.  I just used bottled filtered water that you c...