My bread baking experience is still in the um… highly experimental stages. The weather finally cooled off a little, so I pulled my sourdough starter out of the fridge and worked on turning it into my first handmade loaf of bread. This was probably 36 hours ago and no, I have not yet had the pleasure of an apartment smelling of freshly baked bread to torment my taste buds while I try to force myself to allow the bread to cool properly before slicing into it.

The obvious part of my problem is that my dough doesn’t seem to want to rise. The more challenging bit for this novice bread baker would be a rather frustrated: why ever not?!

A thorough re-read of the web site where I got my sourdough starter recipe (this time including the FAQs) didn’t reveal any clues. Nor did a brief perusal of other sourdough starter pages Google kindly suggested. Time to turn off the computer, I decided, and go for my favorite, tried and true, old fashioned technology… a book.

This book specifically: Bread Science by Emily Buehler, one of the bakers of Weaver Street Market’s fabulous breads. I discovered it several weeks ago, while working at the library’s check-in station, thought it looked interesting enough to add to my enormous pile of “to be read” library books and brought it home. Perhaps I should have read more than the intro before diving into my first attempt at baking bread. I always was more of a play first, read the directions later kind of girl. Most times that approach works well, just not with bread baking. So tonight, I read chapter one: Bread Making Basics and already I’m starting to understand some of my mistakes.

First, when making my starter, I forgot to use water from my water filter pitcher. I used water straight from the tap. Our well water tastes a little odd. Odd enough for me to go buy a water filter pitcher because I found I was loosing interest in drinking water. Likely it would be good for the starter to use the filtered water as well. The next thing I learned is about measuring flour. I did at least know not to pack the cup of flour, scraping the excess off with the flat edge of a knife instead. What I didn’t know was that even that was probably too much flour. Sifting the flour, or spooning the flour into my measuring cup, as I don’t own a sifter, allows more air into the flour and apparently helps keep me from using too much flour.

In reading further, I think I misjudged when my starter was done with its initial phase – living on my kitchen counter and being fed daily. Apparently the many bubbles I saw on the third day may well have been from the formation of the starter’s bacteria (don’t worry, its supposed to have a bacteria in it), rather than the true frothy bubbles signifying healthy, active yeast. Thinking back, I can’t remember if the starter was frothy really, I just remember being excited to see so many bubbles. If I’d left the starter out the rest of the week, the initial bubbles may have died down, to be followed a few days later by the more prolific yeast related bubbles. I think I’ll scrap what’s left of this starter, wash out my container and try again, using the things I’ve learned so far.

My other mistakes seem to be things I can only learn with experience. It sounds like I tried to force too much flour into my dough, making the dough drier than it ought to have been. I’m going to look around online and see if I can find a video tutorial on kneading dough, as I’m pretty sure I over-worked the dough and ended up folding it on itself so many times and so tightly that I squeezed out its remaining ability to rise. Makes me wish (yet again) that my grandmothers were still alive. It would be more fun to learn these things from them than from a book and an online video, but I’ll use what resources I have available and send my grandmothers a silent apology for not being interested in these things when they were still with me. I also think I dried out my dough further by trying to encourage it to rise in a minutely heated oven, without providing it the moisture of a damp towel to balance out the drying warmth of the oven.

For now, I’ve punched down my dough, mostly to get rid of the dried out crust it had formed while I waited and waited for it to rise. I moistened the dough a little and am giving it one last chance to attempt to rise. If nothing happens in the next few hours, I’ll admit rising defeat and bake my bread as is. After all, it’ll still smell heavenly as it cooks, and it might even not taste like cardboard – there’s only one way to find out!

Next time, I’ll try to remember these things I’ve learned (and hopefully I’ll be further through the Bread Science book before I try again). I think I’ll take notes on the next starter and loaf here, to see if the changes make any difference.