T Stands For Tuesday & Sourdough Bread

  Good morning everyone,
    I am posting a wee bit earlier today, as I realized I am soooo behind on everything I want to get done before our friends from Wisconsin come down for their yearly spring get away to visit with us. They will be here early Thursday afternoon. We always cook up lots of good eats too, so a fun time. 
   I am trying to finish up the painting, need to go shopping, clean house, hubs doctors appt got moved to early thursday morning too so this week will fly by for sure.

   Please visit our hostess Elizabeth for our weekly T for Tuesday event where we share our week along with a beverage.

  I have been wanting to get back into sourdough baking again. Before retirement and before I knew I had celiac (no gluten) disease I baked all of our breads and loved the whole process. At the time I had several different soudoughs going on too for different things.
  I decided I wanted to do this again and I thought perhaps I would have better luck with gluten free breads as well-wrong on that so far-sigh.
   Friday evening I decided to get both starters out the wheat and the gluten free and bake us up some breads the next day. I recently purchased a starter from King Arthur Flour along with this very cool crock I have had my eye on for sometime now. This starter was a live culture and is a descendent sourdough from the 1700s-loving that!!  
   I have been experimenting with flours for the gluten free starter and I finally got one that is very active--but bummer the bread still not working out-I know there is no gluten to form the structure but my bread is just not getting baked through--so I am still experimenting- it looked really nice before I baked it too-sigh  I wanted to try this one more time with no added yeast and eggs to see if it would work with a more active starter.
    After this failure I searched online for recipes and looking at the photos of most of them the bread looked awful to me-not really baked or light.
    I did find a book online that I bought that has a totally different approach to gluten free bread baking that I am going to try and I have not totally given up on my sourdough yet either. I really don't eat that much bread but the price of a mini loaf of gf bread is totally crazy so I would like to master this-a challenge for me I guess lol

   However the wheat sourdough bread and biscuits turned out perfect. I originally had planned to set up the cast iron dutch ovens for outdoor baking but it got too windy by the time I was ready to bake--I need to work on some better fire breaks to put around my ovens-living in the woods there is always dried leaves everywhere, definately don't want to start a forest fire.

Here are some photos (click to enlarge)

                          King Arthur wheat sourdough

 
                             Gluten Free sourdough-you can see very active

     Next two photos my gluten free flour blends for breads

           I used this flour and also King Arthur Bread Flour

       Next two photos the sourdoughs being activated

                                       Wheat biscuits

                 The two breads rising in the dutch ovens

          These are the baked up wheat biscuits and bread-perfection lol

This bread was good timing as hubs went fishing on the lake friday morning with friends and they came back with lots of fish (two full buckets full)-so one of our friends made up fried catfish dinner for all of us again-so brought along the fresh baked bread.  I need to remember to grab my camera next time.

I don't drink any soda pop at all, and I am always looking for something a bit healthier that tastes good. I love these coconut water based drinks-they do have a bit of green tea caffeine in them but this brand does not seem to bother me with the caffeine. To limit myself to one of these a day-they say this bottle is two servings-I pour half of it my water bottle and then fill up with ice and water. Nice afternoon and evening beverage. I grabbed my spinning last night while watching tv   Iron Chef is back on Food Network always liked that show-the first new one was on the same time as a Hallmark show I love so will catch a rerun during the week.

Happy T Stands for Tuesday everyone!!