fruit of labour

i finally made the nigella sourdough, after three days of waiting for the starter to grow. a sourdough is basically done in three parts. the first is the starter, which is a bowl of flour-water mixture in which there is a healthy population of yeast. properly fed, it can be perpetuated for years. then the next stage is to draw out some of that starter to make into the sponge, which you leave for twelve hours to ripen. the last stage is mixing that sponge into the final dough, and then you bake it.

no, the process is neither fast nor simple. but you do this because you want to, not because you need a quick fix for breakfast.
it's like an opening ceremony for the sourdough starter. nigella's way is quite a deviation from the normal way, in which you just mix flour and water and wait for the mixture to trap ambient yeasts. her method is to add a tiny bit of yeast into the starter itself to kickstart the growth.

but i've read that whichever yeast is used to grow a starter will eventually die off and be replaced by the ambient yeasts found in the locale the starter is placed in. simply put, if you bring a san francisco sourdough starter into singapore, the yeast in it will eventually be replaced by the strains found in singapore.
this feeding guideline is not what nigella instructed. it is, give or take, what i developed myself after reading everywhere about sourdoughs. i’ve included honey in the feeding formula so as to give the yeast a little treat. bakers all have their own secret formulae for feeding; some use grape skins, others use yoghurt.
this is the sponge, which is the second stage of the sourdough baking process.
the final dough was irritatingly sticky. but i forced my way through folding, dividing, preshaping and shaping it, all the while adding more and more flour into it. still, it was wet and dense.
this is the loaf that i scored with an 'I'. the story i read about sourdoughs is that families in the past had no ovens, so they would bring their loaves down to the bakery for baking; consequently, the only way for each family to recognise their loaves was to score them with their own signatures. so there, mine's an 'I'. somehow, i get happy when i see ovenspring. it makes me feel buoyant, like the loaf itself, expanding up and up.
the loaf cut open. ok, so i think there was nothing much fantastic about the loaf. maybe it's because it's just the first sourdough loaf. supposedly it gets better over time when the starter develops more flavour. still, i think the dough was way too moist, and the resulting crumb sticky.

never mind, i have a use for the bread tomorrow.

whee another cookout. the aim today was to make nigella's chicken pot pie. the only problem was my puff pastry was rotten =(
we cooked the filling as instructed, scaling the recipe up for a few more smaller pot pies. it was quite disgusting to snip the mushrooms, though quite soothing to cut the bacon. i didn't have to touch the raw chicken.
the puff pastry i bought from le bon marche was four months old. one: it was cracked because of the freezing; two: it was (absolutely) stinky because the butter went rancid over such a long time.
the puff pastry had to go. we pulled the pastry tops off the pots and trashed them. so the solution? we used the mashed potato leftover from yesterday to fill the petite pots and topped them with a slice of cut cheese. baked them in the oven as instructed, until some of the filling boiled over.
tuck in~