Everyone I know is on a sourdough kick. My sister was talking some stuff she learned in a class, so I took these photos to show her what "waking up the starter" means to me.
When I took my starter out of the fridge and looked in the crock I saw a deep pool of hooch. It has been since Thanksgiving that I used it, and I may have put this batch in the fridge back in June or July 2018.
I take a heaping spoonful of the starter and...
...gently mix it with 1/2 cup of warm water and 1/2 cup of flour. Then I set it aside for 4 hours.
I feed the starter every 4 hrs when I am awake, until it is awake. When I sleep the yeast can sleep. Once I have 2 cups of starter in my bowl, I discard 1/2 and add 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour again, maintaining the volume at around 2 cups. When the starter looks like this, it is ready to use.
I used the starter, baking a loaf of bread in my Dutch Oven.
Bread with butter, jam and cheese was yesterday's meal. Read the rest “I woke up my long refrigerated sourdough starter”
Konel Bread specializes in bread that depicts animals, cartoon characters, and other fun stuff when it's sliced. Read the rest “SpongeBob bread and other carb-based delights”
How many plastic bread bag clips does Yakima, Washington's Kwik Lok sell annually? "It’s in the billions," says the company's sales coordinator Leigh Anne Whathen. According to Kwik Lok, company founder Floyd Paxton dreamt up the idea in 1954. I wonder if he imagined their other popular use as a makeshift guitar pick. From Atlas Obscura:
As the story goes, while he was on the plane, Paxton was eating a package of complimentary nuts, and he realized he didn’t have a way to close them if he wanted to save some for later. As a solution, he took out a pen knife and hand-carved the first bread clip out of a credit card (in some tellings, it was an expired credit card)...
According to Whathen, Kwik Lok secured a patent on their little innovation in the early days of the company, and to this day, Kwik Lok remains one of the only manufacturers of bread clips in the world. Whathen says that the only other firm she’s aware of is a European competitor called Schutte. Kwik Lok also has the distinction of still being owned by Paxton’s descendants. Floyd’s son, Jerre, ran the company until his death in 2015, and today it is owned by two of Jerre’s daughters. “We’re still going strong,” says Whathen.
"Most of the World’s Bread Clips Are Made by a Single Company" (Atlas Obscura)
(image: DANIELGAMAGE/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Read the rest “Who makes the clips that keep bread bags closed?”
If you have breakfast while traveling in Ireland you are bound to come across brown soda bread. Soda bread is super easy to make and a fantastic comfort food. Read the rest “Bake brown soda bread in a cast iron skillet”
Toast tastes great. I can't have toast, because I'm on a keto diet. So I hate all of you toast-eating people, right now. But I still love Taste Cheshire's toast identification chart, upon which I can drool this fine Tuesday morning.
P.S. I like a nice light E1. Read the rest “It is National Toast Day”
