This is the story of my first handmade sourdough bread which I exclusively made for the 
For weeks now I tried to make a working sourdough starter at home and always on the third day it went bad: the bubbles subsided, the smell was like vomit and I was left with a brownish mass of dead bacteria. Enter Horst. Horst is a super potent sourdough send to me by 
As I am still traumatised from my former sourdough experience, I only took a little bit (10 g) of this dried sourdough, ground it and mixed it with 20 g rye flour and 20 g warm water. Around 6 hours later I saw bubbles, but I forbid myself every emotion and attachment before the sourdough did not survived the third day. So, another feeding, more bubbles. And another one…. And wow, so many bubbles and it smelled a bit like yeast not like acid and vomit like my own attempts. To cut the process short: it worked, and I finally have my own sourdough. And as I am very sceptical in regard to my own sourdough feeding competence I multiplied it, now I have Heidi and Hilary in my fridge (Hilary is undergoing a transformation into a wheat sourdough) and still a bit of dried Horst as a lifeline in a bag (sorry Horst).
All this took place last week, again one of these migraine weeks and I will blame them for my lacking attention. As always, I browsed through Lutz Geißlers books to find the right recipe for my first sourdough bread. I had whole meal rye flour in my cupboard and wheat (so I thought) and I wanted to make a bread which used sourdough and yeast, to be on the safe side. I spotted the right recipe and started… (rightfully you anticipate disaster)
Saturday: feeding the sourdough and let it work for 8 hours - check
Sunday: mixing the sourdough by combining it with more flour, water and salt. And making the yeast starter dough with commercial yeast and wheat whole meal flour… wait… whole meal!!??? Yes, I did not read the recipe attentively and somehow missed that you do not need white flour but whole meal wheat flour. Which I did not have. Sh*** and to make things harder it was Sunday. But do you remember that I encountered this handmade sign at a bakery which said, “Flour and yeast”? I at least remembered and run with a pounding headache to a bakery, which is open on Sunday to buy the gold – ahem flour - which they did not have. But ironically, they had rye flour (the one I now did not need but desperately wanted to buy the last weeks). Back home I decided to use 630 spelt flour instead of the whole meal wheat – check (and sigh)
Still Sunday: I checked this too early from the list, as I had to mix the rest of the “whole meal wheat” (which I did not have so I used a mix of 630 spelt flour and 550 wheat flour) to let it soak for 30 minutes.
And still Sunday: I am honest, I got a bit nervous at this point. Not only did I had intense headaches, also the recipe was much more complicated than all other bread recipes I so far tried. But ok, last step for this day was mixing everything together and bake it.
Please visualise me hitting my head on the table. I thought I should bake the whole mess the next day, but no, only one day rising time.
Sunday 20:00: Me trying to get a smooth and homogeneous dough out of the three mixtures. And as I used different flours (rye has a grey tint, the wheat flour white and the spelt beige) I was perfectly able to notice that they did not want to get combined. I kneaded the mass like a maniac which my husband documented as I already fetched him to take over (headaches, remember). At this moment I decided to endure one more hour of bread making before I would take medication and go to bed.
Sunday 21:00: me forming the strangely marbled dough which thankfully has risen into a round bread. Now my husband had to substitute me and my profound baking knowledge (irony…). I explained oven temperature, heating and baking time and went to bed in hope of getting rid of these ugly headaches.
Sunday 23:15: I woke up again… Not sure if I was too excited to relax because of the bread, or if the medication did not work properly, I will never know, but as I was already awake, I checked the bread. And it worked out!!!! My husband was able to get a wonderful loaf of bread out of the oven. We admired it a bit and decided to wait to the next morning for cutting into it – check: bread baking done.
Monday: The bread was still there and did not vanished or turned out to be one of these dangerous bread hallucinations (
Wow, sorry, I know too many details about a theoretically easy process of baking a sourdough bread. But as it was my first and felt so dramatic for me, I wanted to let you participate. And so that I have the right to post it into the sandwich challenge I will now show you one of my more decadent morning sandwich combinations:
Handmade sourdough bread
Mayonnaise
Handmade Chili ketchup (friends gifted me 12 Chilis and I found a delicious recipe for Chili ketchup with apricots and tomatoes)
Vegetarian cold cuts
Cheese
Cherry tomatoes
If you managed to read so far, I only can admire your endurance and hope you also have some delicious bread to bite into. Oh, and I wanted to give you a fun fact.
*Sometimes I love to watch children’s shows in the background when I cannot concentrate on nothing because of headaches and I found one which is so wonderful: Just add magic. The serial features three children who can perform magic by cooking and baking. And in the last season they are searching for a very potent and dangerous magical object, the magical sourdough starter. Really, a sourdough starter, if that’s not coincidence 😂😂😂😮
