Getting Creative with Sourdough

For the past 13 years, I have been grinding my own wheat and making whole wheat bread for my family.  When a coworker of mine introduced me to her homemade whole wheat bread, she predicted it would be the best bread I had ever tasted. Boy, was she right!  I went right out and bought a grinder and the rest is history.  There have been very few store bought loaves of bread in those years.

I do love to bake and I especially enjoy working with yeast.  This winter I decided to give sourdough a try.  I may eat whole wheat bread at home, but if sourdough is available when I’m eating out, that’s my choice!  So I went online, ordered a crock and some starter, and made the choice to give the whole wheat a break for a while.

One thing I should have realized about sourdough starter is that you have to feed it every week or two.  In order to feed it, you need to either use it or throw some of it away.  Throw it away???   I can’t do that!  Now that creates a problem.  There are only two of us in this house and in spite of loving it, we really don’t eat much bread.  Two loaves of sourdough bread lasts us a month – not even close to keeping up with the starter feeding requirements.  I had to get creative.

So besides just plain old sourdough bread, I made pretzels to serve as snacks during the football playoffs,

I made pretzel rolls to use as hamburger buns…

I even tried my hand at making english muffins!

Gator’s breakfast of choice is an english muffin with peanut butter, so they are getting eaten but he’s not even close to keeping up with the supply.  My freezer is filling up with sourdough products.  I’m really having fun with it but I can’t keep this up for long.  Spring is coming and I’ll be moving on to other things.  I’ll probably have to give up on my starter.  The good news is that I’ll have enough sourdough baked goods to last us through the summer!