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Sourdough Heaven

I’m feeling more confident with my sourdough efforts and we’re so enjoying the bread. Classic Sourdough Revised has become quite worn in just a few weeks. Real books are my preference for cookbooks but I’m tempted to get the Kindle edition also because I spend so much time with this book. The starter I’m using is the one from Sourdo . . the Italian starter. This is the starter that I found to be so tedious to get started but now that it’s going, I love it.  In this picture:  Pizza dough, loaf of bread for slicing, and loaf of crusty Italian bread.

All the Dough

Vince loves crusty bread. Only problem is that he likes to eat stinky cheese with his crusty bread. The stinkier the better . . how does one eat that stuff? I think he likes it just because there are so few things I will not eat and I definitely will not eat most of the cheese he loves.

Here’s the crusty loaf (I forgot to slash the top before baking).

Crusty Loaf

The loaf of slicing bread . . is that not a gorgeous loaf of bread?

Slicing Loaf of Sourdough Bread

And pizza dough! This is where I hit it out of the park!

6 Balls for Pizza Dough

One batch makes six balls of pizza dough. The instructions say that the balls can be frozen after the second rise so I wrapped 5 of them in oiled plastic wrap, stuck them in a freezer bag and we’ll see what happens. I haven’t had good luck with freezing dough and I’m so hoping this works. Making a pizza will be a piece of cake if I can just grab a frozen ball of dough out of the freezer. I will post after I use these frozen dough balls and let you know how if the results are satisfactory.

All the Dough

Growing up in southwest Louisiana, there was a little pizza place on a busy corner that was run by authentic Italians. DiCarlo’s Pizza. The elderly lady (she seemed elderly when I was a kid and she seemed really elderly when I was in college). DiCarlo’s Pizza was like no other pizza I’d ever had and I loved it. My parents aren’t big pizza lovers so we rarely got pizza but even as an adult, it was a treat to get pizza from DiCarlo’s.

Pizza

Hopefully I’m not insulting DiCarlo’s Pizza but my first taste of this brought back memories of DiCarlo’s Pizza. Don’t you love it when you’re not expecting a good memory and it just pops up? The sourdough crust was extra crunchy on the bottom, a bit chewy on top. Toppings include turkey pepperoni, Canadian bacon, black and green olives.

And, though this bread is all so good . .

Button

Sometimes messages are subtle. Sometimes messages are clear. As I was kneading the bread, the button popped off my shorts. Think it could be time to lay off the bread? (Don’t even mention Weight Watchers!) 🙂

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. That button looks like a metal button. They cut the threads, not pop them. Keep on eating the bread as you get plenty of exercise in the yard.

  2. That’s funny. That’s not the kind of button I want to grab and paste anywhere. Ha Ha There’s never a good time for foregoing food. My mom used to make sour dough. I’d sure like to try it, but should I?

  3. I have a sourdough starter my mother gave me. It is probably 30+ years old. The only thing I have ever made is bread, buns, hot rolls and cinnamon rolls. I would love to be able to freeze rolls. My starter is such a lengthy process but the taste is like no other.

  4. Mark Twain said something about parents getting smarter as we get older.

    Like Vince, Dad loved stinky cheese. He told us kids that if we took just one bite we wouldn’t smell it anymore. We preferred to run out of the house carrying on like the smell was poison gas. Years later I tried his advice; not only did I not notice the smell, I liked the very mild flavor of the cheese which tasted nothing like it smelled.

    If it’s going to smell up the house anyway, you might as well enjoy at least a bite of the cheese.

    • Then you’re eating something different. One day I decided to taste it and ran to the bathroom and spit it out. Didn’t like it at all!

  5. I seal my pizza dough, freeze, and thaw in water in the sink. It doesn’t take long to thaw.

    • I don’t even waste a FoodSaver bag because we have pizza a couple of times a week. I just wrapped it in Saran Wrap, dropped those into a big zipper bag and stuck it in the freezer. It only takes about an hour for a ball of dough to thaw on the countertop so I don’t even waste the water of doing it in the sink. My sink is usually full of something this time of year . . with the garden.

  6. My daughter is a pizza chef at a large chain here in the UK and frozen dough is the way it gets delivered to them. The dozen balls are thawed, proved and stretched before being individually topped and cooked and you wouldn’t know it wasn’t freshly made. She is the best chef ever!!

  7. I’ve never had any luck freezing dough; I’ll be really interested in how it works for you.

  9. I’ve been freezing pizza dough for years and it works just fine. You just let it thaw and shape the crust. Sometimes I just make breadsticks with it and sometimes we have calzones. It’s so easy to just take it out of the freezer in the morning and it’s thawed by supper time. (It probably thaws a lot faster in Texas than it does in Michigan though.

  10. On the button, last week a top button popped off my blouse. Since I am pretty certain my “boobs” haven’t grown; you can borrow my theory. Weak threads, most times buttons need to be resown. Beautiful bread.

  12. You made me laugh! I envisioned that tv commercial where buttons pop off and people fall into pools because they are gaining weight as they eat. Too funny! (but it’s worth it!)

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