My sourdough baking started with curiosity and has turned into a weekly joy. Here are 9 reasons why, four months in, I’m still baking away!
While the sun was still coming up and the house was quiet, I padded barefoot to the kitchen this morning to feed my sourdough starter.
As I poured, measured, and whisked, I started thinking about this sourdough journey, and it made me chuckle.
If you had asked me years ago whether I’d ever bake bread every week, I would have laughed myself silly.
But here I am, baking bread every. single. week. And loving it!
Honestly, it surprises even me. I figured my impatience would have given up on it long ago. It hasn’t been six years or anything, but I just looked back through my text messages with the friend who coached me through this, and it has been 4 months, almost to the day, since my sourdough starter and I started this journey together…
As I covered my freshly fed starter with a tight seal of plastic wrap and a towel draped over the top, I thought back to a phone call my husband (then my fiancé) had 34 years ago.
He casually mentioned that his mom baked homemade bread every week, and I couldn’t even imagine it.
I hung up and announced to my mom that she needed to teach me how to bake bread PRONTO, since I didn’t have a clue.
She laughed and laughed, and a few days later she patiently walked me through the steps of baking bread.
I don’t remember a thing she taught me (oh, how I wish I did!). My mind was on planning a wedding, not recipes! I got lost somewhere between the flour in the bin being cooler in winter, so the water needed to be warmer for the yeast… and so on…
All these years later, I have made lots and lots of batches of buns, but until my friend got me excited about sourdough, I had never baked a single loaf of bread.
So I thought it would be fun to look back on how this journey is going at the four-month mark. Here are some of my sourdough bread mom thoughts:
9 Reasons Why I Love Baking Sourdough Bread
- Baking bread once a week has become a routine. Yes, sourdough was a learning curve, but a good one! I don’t always bake on the exact same day each week, but it happens every week.
- The sourdough timeline can be adjusted to fit your schedule. My friend’s timeline, which I wrote about in detail in this beginner’s guide to baking sourdough bread in a Dutch oven, works great. But now that I’ve been doing this for a while, I shift the timeline to fit my schedule. It took some mental gymnastics the first few times I strayed from her schedule, but now I simply think through the timeline and adjust.
- Sourdough tastes so good, crispy on the outside and soft and moist in the center. My niece visited from Montana last month and fell in love with sourdough. “You’ve ruined store-bought bread for me now,” she said. Once she got home, she found some starter and made her own. I loved getting text messages with photos of the progress on her very first loaf!
- You can use sourdough starter in other recipes. Baking sweet treats with sourdough is lots of fun, though they aren’t necessarily quick and easy the way a cake mix is. It feels like old-fashioned baking, and I think it tastes like it, too. It’s so yummy and somehow more wholesome. Here are two sweet sourdough recipes I’ve tried so far: sourdough muffins (you can add whatever fruit you like) and sourdough brownies (our son LOVES these!).
- Sourdough bread saves money. I didn’t think about this when I started. Sourdough is really just flour, water, and salt. I can make a lot of loaves from one bag of flour! Besides long-fermented Dutch oven sourdough, I often bake a batch of honey oat sourdough bread as well. My husband loves making sandwiches for his lunches.
- Sourdough doesn’t need a ton of special equipment, though it’s there if you want it! I was determined to make sourdough without buying any fancy tools at first. I managed that for 3 months, but once I knew I was going to stick with it, I bought a few things. The Danish whisk is wonderful for breaking up the starter when whisking it with water, and a bread lame works much better for scoring the loaf than a straight razor does. My straight razor started rusting really fast! I also bought a silicone baking mat to save on parchment paper. I’ll use it for the first time when I bake tomorrow, and we’ll see how it goes. The next thing I’ll probably buy is a banneton basket for proofing. So yes, then I’ll have all the sourdough gadgets! I could have just bought the starter kit. Ha ha!!
- Sourdough has been good for my sensitive tummy. I hesitate to claim any health benefits here, since health and nutrition aren’t my area of expertise. I do encourage you to read up yourself to see if it might help with your dietary needs. I’ve always loved bread but thought I needed to cut it out completely to keep my weight down. Instead, I’ve been eating sourdough in moderation, and my stomach seems to love it! I especially like it toasted with avocado on top. (Here’s what I do for how to freeze avocados, which makes it so quick and convenient!)
- You don’t have to be a sourdough expert to start. And you don’t become an expert overnight! I’ve been baking and enjoying sourdough every week for four weeks, but if you ask me to troubleshoot a problem with your loaf, I won’t be much help!!;) Because sourdough is a living culture, working with it is like science. Every person’s starter becomes unique as soon as they add their own water and flour. Temperature, humidity, filtered water, and all sorts of things affect how it turns out, and I don’t understand all of it! But if you have questions, search online, and you’ll probably find plenty of opinions, options, and ideas.
The truth is, I never know if our sourdough is technically “right.” Should it have more holes? Should it have risen more? Every now and then I ask my husband, and his answer is always the same.
“I don’t really care if it’s ‘right,’” he says. We think it tastes great, and that’s all that really matters!
Amen to that!
Shop My Favorite Sourdough Baking Tools
Disclosure: I am an Amazon affiliate, and the following are affiliate links for your shopping convenience.
Like I mentioned earlier, you certainly don’t need all the gadgets to start baking sourdough. But I’ve added to my collection little by little.
I’ve put all my favorite sourdough tools and some other options in my Amazon storefront for the USA and my Amazon storefront for Canada.
Question for you:
Is there something you started learning reluctantly that you ended up loving? If so, I would LOVE to hear what it was! Comment below. I’d love to hear your story.
