dolorosa_12 | (Reply)

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I never got into the sourdough thing, but that's at least partially because my housemates and I were lucky, and already had a decent store of yeast and flour before panic buying set in etc (by coincidence), and then our local little sainsbury's got flour and yeast back in stock AND (almost) NOBODY NOTICED. so even when the big tesco was sold out of everything for weeks on end, our local little sainsbury's usually had stuff. the only reason why I'm making sourdough now (faux sourdough, at that) is because I was making a specific Scandinavian bread that requires buttermilk-sourdough slop made the day before, so it's not like I made an actual sourdough starter that I now have to keep alive....I tried that a few years ago and just did not succeed.

i like baking and cooking to begin with and habitually make banana bread and banana cake (because I'm terrible at eating my bananas before they turn brown). then during lockdown, not having a commute or much of an external schedule (since all we did was write papers and then a dissertation, no teaching from march onwards and none of us had jobs), we got into the habit of making pizza every Saturday and focaccia every Wednesday, and I got into the habit of baking my own Scandinavian style crispbreads as well. for me it's not so much therapeutic (I mostly make no-knead breads as my wrist tendonitis makes it hard for me to knead) as it's just a nice thing to have fresh baked bread in the house, and it's so easy. just make the dough, let it rest while you do other stuff, put in pan, let rest again while you do other stuff, stick it in the oven, eat. I rapidly lose interest in fresh baked bread once a day has passed (it's never as good as it is those first few hours!!) but luckily my housemates, current and past, have never had that weird hangup about fresh bread, so they'll happily finish off the bread I make over the next few days 😂😂😂😂

....er yeah so I can talk about bread and baking forever, seems like. I'm baking sourdough bread again today because I had enough buttermilk leftover to make a second loaf.