Belated Sourdough Finale

Happy new year!
It's been months but I'm finally around to write some closure to the summertime enterprise of creating a sourdough starter. It's the only thing I could really do.

Thankfully! The sourdough turned out alright in the end. The starter admittedly took ages but by early September I was able to produce a single boule of sourdough bread.

I fretted over for a time whether the dough would actually proof but hey, the starter had met plenty the requirements for a useable starter-- enough air bubbles to pass the float test, sweet scent (a characteristic of amylase enzymes?), etc. so it's ought to yield some result. Take note of the errors and learn for the future.

Making the dough was a bit of a fuss as this specific dough was first mixed, stretched and folded around four times over 30 minute intervals, let bulk rise for two hours, chilled overnight, then finally baked the next day. As previously mentioned, I have no prior breadmaking experience as well as the patience for it, so everything felt a little tedious. But once you get over that it's not too bad.

I'm proud of the final result! Definitely resembled a boule of bread, the crust had a nice shade of golden brown and a good crispy sound. The only problem present was that the texture of the bread itself was kinda dense and gummy. Typically this is a sign of underbaking, the oven temperature may have been too high and baked for too short of a time, or that I should've let the loaf cool for longer. Likely a combo of both. But overall, not a total flub.

Since I would be back on campus the following weeks with no time to maintain the starter, the discard and the finished starter were air dried individually for future use.

Out of the various other things that I used the discard for, like waffles and banana bread, I think the best thing that came out of all of this were the cinnamon rolls made in the weeks after.