It is NOT spring.

I thought the nice weather last weekend was a tease, and I was right. Winter is back with temperatures in the teens and a biting north wind blowing snow horizontally. Bah. The chickens wouldn’t even come out of the coop for scratch grains or carrot peelings.

Snow flying horizontally

Terry has been keeping busy cleaning up a massive oak tree that fell in the backyard of a friend of mine. When she posted about it on Facebook, I emailed her with an offer to have Terry cut it up in exchange for the wood. It has been a win-win all around. The tree brought down several other trees as well. Here’s as much as he’s brought home so far.

Terry's stash of firewood

And here he is looking pleased as punch. He’s gotten quite profligate about how much wood he uses each day to keep his shop warm. No more need to ration supplies!

Terry is pleased with his haul

I just finished reading Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked. In the back was a recipe for whole grain sourdough bread, including making a starter from natural bacteria and yeasts. I already had starter, so I figured I’d give it a go. My general rule of thumb for this kind of bread is no more than half whole grain or you end up with a door stop.  The recipe was 60% whole wheat and 15% rye. Door stop.

And yet, the recipe did call for soaking the whole grains overnight, a technique I’d seen on America’s Test Kitchen. The presoak softens the bran so it doesn’t cut up the gluten as much. Maybe it would work.

Tw days before baking, I woke up my starter by feeding it in the evening and the next morning. That evening, I made the leaven by mixing whole wheat and bread flour with some of the starter and put the rest of the starter back in the refrigerator. In a separate bowl, I weighed the whole wheat and rye flours and added water. In the morning, a bit of the leaven floated in water, just like it was supposed to. So far, so good. I mixed it with the soaked flours. Every hour for five hours, I wetted my hand and turned the dough in the bowl. It did not look like it was rising much in between. Door stop.

I split the dough in two on the floured counter. The recipe said to roll each loaf in bran (which was sifted from the whole wheat flour before soaking, which I was totally not going to do) or dust the rising bowls with rice flour. (There was a note that you could use a proofing basket if you had one—HA HA HA HA! Who owns a proofing basket? It’s probably lined with linen. I can only dream.) I was also not going to buy a whole box? Bag?-- I don’t even know how it is sold—of rice flour for 2 tablespoons. What else would I use rice flour for? I always have wheat bran on hand, so I rolled away. It didn’t stick everywhere because of the flour from the counter. It seemed to me that the dough was going to cling to the rising bowl, but the recipe didn’t say to grease it. Maybe there was enough gluten that the dough would stick more to itself than the bowl? Maybe the dough had to climb up the sides to rise properly?

After two hours, I preheated the Dutch oven. I tried to turn the dough out into the hot Dutch oven. It stuck to the bowl. Massively. Of course I did not have a dough scraper on hand. Damn it. I did the best I could to free the dough from the bowl with my hand. I’m sure the dough was completely deflated by the time I shook it around in the Dutch oven to get it more or less loaf-shaped. This was NOT good.

And somehow, when I took the lid off the Dutch oven, there was not the door stop I was expecting, but a loaf of bread. Pretty flavorful bread, in fact. Was it worth two days? Hmmm.

Whole grain sourdough bread