Heaven in my Kitchen ? My first sour dough bread!

As some you will know, I have been feeding a sour dough baby in my fridge for days after receiving the Bread Bakers Apprentice for Christmas and finally, after one failed attempt, I put my first loaves into the oven on Sunday. I made a New York Deli Rye, as called in Peter Reinhart’s book and waited nervously for them to come out of the oven. What if after all this waiting and building up my expectations the bread didn’t turn out well? What if didn’t taste like the sour dough I expect? To my relief, the bread was divine with it’s thick crisp crust and dense but chewy, soft, sweet centre. We couldn’t even wait the hour to let it cool off as Peter advises, the smell tormenting us as it wafted through the house, so we dug in as soon as it was cool enough to get our hands round it!

The wonderful thing about a sour dough bread is that the flavour seems to mature after a few days rather than go stale so we have found ourselves enjoying bread all week. Tonight I am preparing a basic white sour dough, ready to go into the oven tomorrow when I will be celebrating my birthday with bread instead of cake….and why not, Marie Antoinette will have approved!

I haven’t added the recipe since it takes 6 days to make and I would be nervous about missing something critical out so instead I have linked to Peter Reinhart’s blog.